What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  The thing with Bush, it wasn’t just about wealth: sure, he wanted to get rich, like anyone else ... but not private-island rich, Monte-Carlo-in-the-winter rich. What drew him, what he had to have, was the game itself, the great doings ... so absorbing, so do-or-die. This was a game where he could shine! But, alas, by 1950, when he and Bar moved back to West Texas (over two years, Dresser Industries had moved him from Odessa, Texas, to a subsidiary in Huntington Park, California, and then to Bakersfield, then Whittier, then Ventura, then Compton, and, finally, back to Texas ...), George Bush was not in the game—not really. He was only a salesman of drill bits.

  By the time George and Bar came back, the Scurry boom, a couple of counties away, to the northeast, was pumping out a fortune in oil, and the fortune was landing on Midland. Ideco, where Bush was employed, had its warehouse in Odessa. But Odessa was just a blue-collar town, home to roughnecks and equipment engineers (whose sons were perennial champs in the local high school football league). The West Texas offices of the major oil companies, and the brightest of the Yankee independents, were twenty miles northeast, in Midland. That was the place for Bush. ... Problem was, finding a place. Midland now had three paved streets, but almost fifteen thousand souls packed into a town built for half that number. Oil was booming during the war, and for all the years thereafter. But it wasn’t till a few years after the war that anyone, or anyone’s money, could beg or buy enough wood, steel, or cement to build a block of office space, not to mention a thousand houses. So when the Bushes got back, there was no house. And now they were four. Little Georgie was almost ready for school, and back in one of those godforsaken California towns, he’d been joined by a baby sister, a beautiful little blonde whom George and Bar named Pauline Robinson Bush. Still, best they could do, for the moment, was a ratty motel called, by happenstance, George’s Court.

  Well, it was a wonderful adventure. They checked in, and every day, Barbara Bush would entertain two kids in one room, while George Bush drove the twenty miles southwest on Route 80—as bleak a drive as the U.S. offered; the sandstorms would take paint off your car—to his Ideco warehouse in Odessa, then back, at night, to his wife and kids in their motel. At last, someone built a tract of houses—wrong side of town, and no great shakes: all the same floor plan, 847 square feet (including carport), and an extra slab of cement, called a patio, that was buried in sand whenever the wind kicked up—but hell, they were houses. The tract got the nickname Easter Egg Row, for the way the developer painted these boxes—yellow, green, blue, or pink—mostly so you could tell which was yours. George and Bar bought one for $7,500—a bright blue egg, on a street called Maple. Of course, there wasn’t a maple within five hundred miles.

  But a lot of the independents were moving into Easter Egg Row. Red and Ferris Hamilton (brothers and proprietors of the Hamilton Oil Co.) lived one street over. Ashmun and Hilliard got an Easter Egg to share, couple of blocks away. John Overbey, who was a Texan, an independent, just starting out, got a house across Maple from George and Barbara Bush. And that was how Bush made his move. Even at the start, it was all about friends. George would get home around six at night, and sometimes, Overbey would get back then, too. George would call him over for a drink, a cold martini on the patio (inside, if the dust was blowing), or maybe burgers from the backyard grill. He’d say to John, “Whad’ja do today?” And Overbey would tell his stories.

  Overbey was a land man who’d scout out a likely property and try to cut a deal with the rancher who owned it, for a lease on the mineral rights. Overbey never had a pool of capital, so usually, he’d broker the lease, quick as he could, sell it to a major, or a big independent, who might be interested in drilling there. Sometimes John would take the money and run, maybe make a few hundred dollars over cost. Sometimes he’d sell the lease at cost, but carve out an override: that is, he’d keep a sixteenth or a thirty-second of any future production. The point was, he was in the game, and he always had a story to tell. ... Maybe, that day, it was a tale of his travels to a dusty little town called Monahans, where he took the local abstractor out for a beer at the only joint in town, and found out Gulf Oil was buying, right there, on the edge of Rattlesnake Air Force Base. Or maybe he’d spent the day on his maps in his office, which was a single room in the old Scharbauer Hotel, which he shared with five fellows, one of whom, Charlie Roberts, always had a crap game going in the back. ...

  “Well, I had a hell of a day,” Overbey would start out, after a few sips. “Took a trip downta Rankin ... piece-a land looked pretty good. Looked like, on the map, like it might be open, so I went down to have a talk with this ol’ rancher, Ad Neil ...”

  “Yeah?” Bush was soaking this stuff up.

  “Yeah. So, I hunt him up, see if I could get a price outta him. ... Well, he’s brandin’ cattle ... he wouldn’t come outta damn corral. So I sat around on his fence half a day ... then the sonofagun wants me buy him a beer, before he’ll even talk to me.”

  “So did you?”

  “Yep.”

  You could just about see Bush’s eyes shining with the stories, the exotica of old Texas ranchers, the snooping around on the majors, the lure of the game. ... Poor Bush only had a few stories about the guys he worked with at Ideco, and occasionally something funny some old roughneck would say at a well site, when George Bush stopped by to see if they’d need any bits. But that wasn’t the game, no. ... Overbey, even in his tiny way, was just where Bush wanted to be.

  Pretty soon, with every story, he’d be asking Overbey a raft of questions. How much money could you make from a lease like that? Well, what could you have made, if you’d kept it, instead of brokering it? How much would it cost to drill one test there? ...

  Finally, one night. Bush said: “Geez, if I could raise some money, do you think we could do that? ... Maybe get in business?” Overbey considered the proposition for about thirty seconds, before he said, yeah, he figured they could.

  In the short run, money was equal or better than know-how. And money—to be precise, OPM, Other People’s Money—was the calling card of the best young Yalie independents. Earle Craig was playing with Pittsburgh money. So were Ashmun and Hilliard. (H.T. “Toby” Hilliard was actually Harry Talbot Hilliard, of the Talbots of Fox Chapel, where the Mellons and friends had their houses.) Hugh and Bill Liedtke were keyed into oil money from Tulsa. Without outside money, you could spend a long while hustling leases before you could call any oil your own. So Overbey would be happy to show Bush everything he knew ... Bush happily flew east to talk to Uncle Herbie. And Herbie Walker was delighted to place a bet on his favorite, Poppy, and to tell his Wall Street friends all about the doings of Pres Bush’s boy. Pres himself went in for fifty thousand, along with Herbie, and some of Herbie’s London clients, who all got bonds for their investment, along with shares in the new company—Bush-Overbey, they called it. Herbie Walker had decreed the name. After all, it was his money.

  It was about $300,000, when they added it all together. So Bush and Overbey rented an office on the ground floor of the Petroleum Building—got it from Fred Turner, an independent who was moving up. But Bush-Overbey only took half—one room (the other was rented to insurance agents). A cautious player was George Bush. He wanted to be in the black every quarter. One room was enough, and a desk for each, two chairs, two typewriters, file cabinets, and a map rack. That was the sum total of equipment of the Bush-Overbey Oil Development Co. They weren’t going to sit in the office, anyway.

  Soon enough, Overbey had Bush out in his Chevy, plowing through the gritty wind out to Pyote, Snyder, and Sterling City. ... Overbey had a few irons in the fire, and there was a piece of land right next to a dry hole that actually had a little show—just not enough to make a commercial well. But a half-mile south, now, maybe different story ... you never could tell. No one was perfectly smart about this ... it’s like old H.L. Brown—Windy Brown, outta Fort Worth—used to say about the Scurry County boom, he used to say: “There was a time, if my land man even drove across that cou
nty, I’da fired him.” See, you never could tell where the next boom was coming.

  And Bush drank this all in, the lore, the lingo, all the names. He and Overbey scurried around, spending Herbie’s money, trying to get it back as quick as they could. Kept a sixteenth here, a thirty-second there. ... And now, Bush had maps under his arm as he breezed into The Spot for lunch. (“Just a bowla red, Helen. Gotta run. ...” Bush was the first of the Yalies to go local with his diet—bowl of chili and crackers for lunch, chicken-fried steak at night.) Bush got to be a good hand with the records, and he was great on the personal side: people who came by the office to bullshit a minute, on their way somewhere, would find him, in the mornings, typing out friendly notes to people he met the day before. Sometimes, if you didn’t have something he ought to hear, you couldn’t pull him away from that typewriter for two minutes! He was always on the go, assiduous about the work. He was head of a family of four, steward to his father’s money, and his uncle’s, and his uncle’s friends’ ... a man with rent to pay, a balance sheet to fret into the black ... a man with a deal to promote—Hey, this thing is surefire! ... a man with stories to tell (“Head geologist for the whole damn region gets up in the middle of the meeting ... and pisses in the sink!”) ... a man twenty-seven years old ... an independent oilman.

  Well, there never was a County Attorney like Bob Dole. People said it was probably because he had a question in his own mind—could he do it?—that he worked so hard. There never was a time when he wasn’t working, seemed like. He’d get to the courthouse, his second-floor office, maybe eight, eight-thirty. Usually, he’d have court in the morning, if the judge was in Russell that day. It wasn’t that crime was such a problem—crime like we know it, anyway—but there were disputes about land and water rights, sometimes a bit of cattle rustling. (One fellow asked his neighbor, nice as pie, to borrow his truck one night, then used it to go steal cattle—that’s the guts of a burglar: Sheriff Harry Morgenstern caught him at the auction house, with the check still in his pocket, and Bob sent him up the river.) There was always farm thievery and the usual run of drunk and disorderly. ... In the beginning. Bob would generally go home for lunch, then be back for the afternoon, when he’d go home again, then he’d be back in the office at night. Evenings, he’d try to do his private work: wills and license applications that the farmers brought in. Bob never charged them much—maybe five or ten dollars. He needed friends more than money: there was always another election in two years. Springtime, they’d bring him their tax returns, and Bob would fill them out (“How many those steers d’you sell last fall? ...”) for two bucks, or even free. There was one CPA in Russell, but he had his hands full with the bankers and the oilmen. And Bob didn’t mind. He had the time—or he made it. At Dawson Drug, when Chet and Bub would get the fountain clean, get the floor swept and the door locked, maybe eleven at night, they could always look down Main Street and see Bob’s light in the courthouse.

  Phyllis didn’t mind, or said she didn’t. She kept busy—in two or three bridge groups. She got Bob to go with her to a Sunday night game, and he was good, but after a while, he didn’t have time. They rented a house on Sixth Street, and Phyllis had that to fix up: she did it early American, with stuff all stenciled and hand-painted like they did in New England. No one in Russell had ever seen its like. Phyllis taught some crafts to the local ladies—ceramics: no one in Russell had used that word before. Of course, there were friends, too, and family—Bob’s family. Sometimes Phyllis would fill in alone, at Bina’s house, for Sunday dinner, or potluck; Bob was working. Bina and Phyllis got along fine. Phyllis even learned, in time, how to make fried chicken. When all that wasn’t quite enough, Phyllis took a job, part-time, at a florist’s. Bob wasn’t happy about that. In those days, if your wife went to work, it said something about you, as a man. But he didn’t say anything. It’d be different ... if they had kids.

  It seemed like they never were going to have a child. Phyllis got herself tested, and the doctors didn’t see anything they could do. Bob was always ready, in those days, to fear the worst about his own body, and one time, he went all the way to Chicago for tests. (Dr. Kelikian set that up.) But none of the doctors could say what the problem was—if there was a problem. After a while, they figured it just wasn’t in the cards ... maybe they’d adopt, but for that you had to do a home visit, it was part of the routine with the agency in Topeka—and that cost money, and ... well, it dropped through the cracks, for a while.

  Anyway, it wasn’t like Bob had time to sit and worry. It seemed like he was always pushing harder, just to see how much he could do. Sometimes, he and Phyllis would go to someone’s house for dinner, or bridge, and, come eleven, Bob would stand up and say he had to get back to the office. After midnight—till the bars on the highway closed—Sheriff Morgenstern would drive around, nab a drunk driver or two. And generally, when he got them back to the courthouse, he’d find Bob still at his desk. They’d book the drunks and arraign ’em, right there, 2:00 A.M. ... Bob figured it was his job to get those cases out of the way. That’s how he met Huck Boyd. Huck was a small-town newspaper editor and a Republican bigwig—National Committeeman for the state of Kansas. Anyway, one night Huck was driving through, on his way home to Phillipsburg, in northwest Kansas. Must have been midnight, and Huck looked up, saw a light in the courthouse. He thought there must be a break-in ... got out of his car and went to investigate, and he found young Bob Dole, working at his desk. County Attorney ... at midnight! Huck told the story to friends around the state. Meanwhile, he marked that boy Dole as a comer.

  That he was. Summertime, when the farmers were lined up with the harvest on Main Street, Bob’d work his way down the row of trucks, just like he used to for Dawson Drug, except this time, he was only saying hello, shaking hands. Sometimes, he wouldn’t even make it home for meals—he’d stay downtown for lunch with Harry, the Sheriff, then catch dinner at a Legion affair, or the Rotary. Sometimes, Phyllis used to say, it was like they didn’t have time to talk ...

  “What do you wanna talk about?” Bob would say.

  She didn’t ask about his work. She got that piece of advice from another lawyer’s wife, Doc Smith’s wife: “Sometimes, it’s better not to know.” So Phyllis steered clear of his work life. It was just ... that didn’t seem to leave any life for her. When she did catch him, long enough to have a conversation, it was generally whether they were going this weekend to someone’s house for dinner, or when Bob was going to get home that night. To which Bob would issue his standard reply, which was: “Depends.”

  Depends on what?

  “On a lotta things.”

  Thing was, everyone talked about how well Bob was doing: Bina, the Dawsons, the old crowd in general. And Phyllis, for her part, certainly wasn’t going to complain: she told her mother, who came to visit, that she loved Kansas—the people in Kansas. Her mother, Estelle, couldn’t stand the place—it gave her the creeps, driving through the flat emptiness, past nothing but a thousand telephone poles, and then, on one pole, you’d see a sign: CITY LIMITS. How could you live like that? One time, Estelle and Phyllis’s dad drove through Russell, all the way to Denver, and when Estelle came back she announced to the Doles: “Now I understand that cowboy music ... it’s nothing but a howl of human loneliness.”

  Phyllis was lonely sometimes, too, but she did what she had to—she found plenty to do. One springtime, she devoted weeks to learning how to make sugar Easter eggs. They were tiny, ornate, something she’d never seen before. Finally, one night, when Bob was home for dinner, she showed him: “Look, aren’t these wonderful?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “was it worth walkin’ on sugar for two weeks?”

  It would be different, she thought, if they had a family. So they filed the papers to adopt in Topeka, but it took a long time, more than a year ... and by that time, Phyllis found out she was pregnant. Bob and Phyllis had a little girl, whom they named Robin. And Bob was very pleased. He even came home in the evenings, for a while.

/>   16

  1953

  EVERYBODY SHOWED UP FOR touch football, except Hugh. It was the big event of the week. The fellows would gather Sunday afternoons, after church, at the high school practice field, mostly just to hack around, while the wives on the sidelines peered into one another’s prams and talked about houses, schools, and kids. It was a family affair, start to finish. No one brought beer. And no one took the game seriously—save, perhaps, for Bush, who was always the quarterback, and called the plays, did the passing, and most of the running, too.

  Sometimes, there was a real game—when they challenged the fellows from Lubbock, for instance. But even that was tongue-in-cheek. The Midland guys named the game the First Annual Martini Bowl. They named their team the Midland Misfits. They even printed a program, with ads from Bush-Overbey, and Liedtke & Liedtke, Attorneys at Law.