The troops were mostly women in those days, battle-hardened matrons who’d kept the flame when the whole county convention wouldn’t fill a good-sized coffee shop, who’d fought like cheetahs for the last few years to keep the Bircher goofballs out of the office. Of course, the ladies loved George, adored him. He was so young, for one thing—just thirty-eight—and eager, enthusiastic ... and so handsome, the way he’d stand up, tall and slender in front of the room, and talk about what the Party meant, with his high voice coming from up behind his nose, with that foreign eastern accent. Well, it was like Cary Grant, or David Niven, come to work at the office. And that was just the start: then they found out how kind he was, how interested in them, grateful for their work, eager to include them, to be their friend ... he was so decent!
Too decent for politics.
They all agreed about that.
They had to protect him.
Poor George didn’t even know who was a nut, and who was out to get him. He was so nice to those Birchers ... really, sometimes, you wanted to shake him by the neck!
He couldn’t see, the nuts hated him. They could smell Yale on him. Of course, it didn’t help, the first time Jimmy Bertron introduced him to the executive committee: “Good friend of mine,” Jimmy said. “George Bush ... only thing wrong with him, he beats me at tennis.”
Yuk. Yuk.
You could have heard a pin drop. Gene Crossman, one of the good ol’ slimeball right-wingers, said: “Thass it, dammit. I’m not votin’ for ’nother country-club asshole. Y’kin jus’ fergit it.”
But George had the idea they should all get along. He thought he could talk to the Birchers, make them like him ... once they got to know him. They were probably good folks, underneath. He was always saying stuff like, “We all have the same basic goals ...” He couldn’t seem to get what was basic to the Birchers: being rid of him and everyone like him ... like Eisenhower, Rockefeller ... like all those rich, pointy-head, one-worlder, fellow-traveler, eastern-Harvard-Yale-country-club-Council-on-Foreign-Relations commie dupes!
No, George tried to talk to them, reason with them, involve them. He wanted them to come, participate, join the committees. He wanted to know them, to see their lives, to let them see his. He had them over to his house, for meetings, for breakfasts with him and Bar. He had everybody over to his house on Briar Drive. He wanted to share, see, him and Bar—they made everybody feel so comfortable there. It was a fine, big house in the Tanglewood section, but nothing austere about it: everything was comfy, the sofas, the chairs. You’d come in, sit down, and George would serve drinks, padding around with no shoes, in a sport shirt. The dog would come around—that dog who’d get crippled, psychosomatically paralyzed, any time George and Bar went away. That was always a joke with the Bushes. And the kids would be running around, in and out of doors that led from the family room to the backyard. They were all still in school—Doro was only three or four years old—but they were good kids, who’d always say hello to grown-ups. On the wall, there was the portrait of Robin, the little girl who died. You felt a part of it all, even when you just came for a meeting. Of course, that’s how George wanted you to feel.
Wanted everyone to feel: sure, some of those folks had extreme ideas. But Bush was not one to judge a man on account of his ideas ... no. So, first thing, he put out a half-page memo, telling everybody: no more name-calling. “We’re all Republicans, and we’re not going to divide ourselves, calling anyone ‘crazies,’ or ‘nuts’ ...” He didn’t want to hear the word “nut.” (So what they did, they started calling everybody “Kernel” ... Kernel Smith, or Kernel Crouch, or Kernel Nancy Palm, better known as Kernel Napalm ... it was Bob Crouch who started it—had to have some word for “nut.”)
Then—this was ’63—Bush decided the Birchers had to have jobs, they had to be involved, he was going to give them precincts!
“George, you don’t know these people,” Sarah Gee, one of the stalwart ladies, tried to tell him. “They mean to kill you!”
“Aw, Sarah,” he’d say. “There’s some good in everybody. You just gotta find it.”
The first was a gal named Randy Brown. George made them vote to give her a precinct. Sarah was livid. All the ladies were furious. Randy didn’t even hide her contempt! What got into Bush? Couldn’t he see? ... He made them vote her in, and they were coming out of the dining room, after the vote, and he was coming downstairs from his office, at that moment. There he was, beaming like a kid, as he said, “Congratulations!” ... Randy stared up at him, not a hint of a smile, and said: “George, you’ll rue the day you made ’em put me on.”
No, he couldn’t see. Or didn’t choose to. For one thing, he was too excited. There were too many good things happening. Good things for the Party. Good things for him. All those new friends! Nice things people said ... they were talking to him about the U.S. Senate!
Sure, it’d be tough, but he had a shot ... if he could unite the Party, draw some conservative Democrats ... he’d unite them all around his person. They had to like him ... he knew they would. Goldwater would unite the Party—just the kind of Republican the Texas GOP could get behind. Hell, just the man for Bush to get behind! He was so un-eastern, un-monied, un-moderate. Bush was big for Goldwater in ’64—whole hog for Barry!—no one was going to out-conservative George Bush.
Tell the truth, Bush’s program wasn’t in conflict with Goldwater’s ... as Bush didn’t have a program. Sure, he was conservative—a businessman who had to meet a payroll—but that’s about as far as it went, on policy. One of the first times he ever made a speech—some little town just south of Houston—one good ol’ boy stood up in the crowd and asked Bush for his position on the Liberty Amendments. Well, Bush didn’t have a clue about the Liberty Amendments. (They were a series of Bircher Constitutional changes to get America out of the UN, repeal the income tax, abolish the Federal Reserve, a few other things like that.) Poor Bush was helpless. He turned to Barbara, the eastern matron, busy at her needlepoint on stage ... no help there. So Bush said he hadn’t had time, yet, to study those important amendments ... but he certainly would.
Tell the truth, Bush wasn’t much for programs, one way or the other. It wasn’t that he wanted to do anything ... except a good job. He wanted to be a Senator. ... Just about the time he was thinking it over, about to announce his big move, there were stories in the paper—front page, it was awful!—about this little girl in the Houston public housing, sleeping on the floor, who’d got bitten by a rat! God, what a shame! ... Bush didn’t think about a program for housing, or maybe calling that Councilman he helped to elect—propose a rat eradication plan! No, he called home, that afternoon:
“Bar? ... You think we could give that family our baby bed?”
And they did. That very evening, George came home, packed up that bed, and took it right over.
That’s why Bush was gonna win the election: concern for the common man. Common values ... common decency. That’s what people had to know about him ... that, and the fact—Bush could see it, everywhere—the Democrats were out of touch. They’d held on to Texas since the Civil War! They’d lost sight of the common folk ... that was Bush’s secret weapon. The Democrats were split, right down the middle. The incumbent Senator was an old-fashioned liberal, Ralph Yarborough—out of step with the new Texas, George Bush’s Texas. The state was changing—Bush knew it, just as surely as Nixon beat Kennedy in Houston, last time—but old Yarborough hadn’t got the wake-up call. He was still traveling the state in his white suit and big white hat, promising the world. ... Bush knew he could take him. Jeez, even Lyndon couldn’t stand Yarborough (Yarborough called Johnson “power mad”). And now that LBJ was Vice President—that had to hurt Yarborough, didn’t it? Johnson would be running with Kennedy again—that was the good news for the Democrats. But people didn’t vote straight ticket anymore ... LBJ on the ballot might even help Bush ... everybody knew how Lyndon hated Yarborough.
So Bush started talking it up—Senator!—just to friends, at t
he start. And there were more than a couple who suggested that maybe he ought to go easy, take it slow ... maybe run for office once, you know, something local, or Congress ... how ’bout Congress first? But Bush didn’t want to hear that. He was going to announce, September ’63. He’d do it with a splash! He knew where he belonged—in the U.S. Senate. Jeez, almost a year now, and his father still regretted leaving the Senate.
Oh, God—Dad! ... Big Pres could be a problem!
Prescott Bush was not a Goldwater man. In fact, he was just the kind of fellow that the eastern wing was counting on to get behind someone decent ... like Rockefeller, or Lodge—or Bill Scranton ... someone to stop that nut, Goldwater. In fact, just a year or so after retirement, Pres would have liked nothing better than to keep his hand in, at least in Connecticut.
But George called, asked him flat-out: Don’t do it! It was bad enough, they were talking in the churches of Pasadena about Bush’s father, the Senator, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations! If he came out against Goldwater ...
And so, Pres had to swallow it down, for his son. The torch had passed ... to young George. It was his turn. Prescott Bush sat on his hands in ’64. The whole campaign through, he could barely say a word. He confirmed and completed his sad political exile.
And in Texas, George Bush started campaigning in earnest. He’d have to have men in the field—area chairmen! It was time to make his move—so he called a meeting ... and, as his first appointment, he turned to that slimeball Bircher, Gene Crossman, and appointed him to head up East Texas.
Well, that was too much for the ladies. One of the veterans, Linda Dyson, heard about Crossman, and she marched up the stairs of HQ, right to the front bedroom, George’s office ... where she flung open the door, and shouted in Bush’s frozen face:
“George Bush! Y’know what your problem is? ... You don’t know the difference between a common man and a common common man.”
But he knew how to make a man feel special—and that’s what he did, all over the state. Bush had a four-man primary, and one of his opponents was Jack Cox, another young comer, a hot stump speaker who’d already run for Governor (and gave John Connally a run for his money).
Bush—well, he wasn’t much on the stump. He’d get cranked up, dive into a twisty river of a sentence, no noun, a couple or three verbs in a row, and you wouldn’t know where he was headed—sometimes for minutes at a stretch, while his hands sawed and pulled at the air, smacked on the podium, drew imaginary lines and boxes without name, without apparent reference to what he was talking about, which you couldn’t exactly tie down, unless you caught a key word, now and then, like “Sukarno,” or “taxes,” or “lib-rull” (that one came up a lot), although you could tell it really hacked him off, the way his voice rose through the octaves—until he emerged on the other side of the Gulf of Mexico, red in the face, pleased as hell with himself, spluttering out the predicate, or maybe the direct object of that second-last verb, and a couple more random words that had occurred to him in the meantime, and you could see he cared, and it all went together in his mind, but it wasn’t clear exactly how, or what it was he thought was so damned important.
Fortunately, there weren’t many speeches required in the primary, which was a meet-the-folks affair in most Texas towns, where you could still get the registered Republicans into a single room. He did covered-dish dinners, cocktail parties, barbecues ... and he was beautiful. He’d talk to everybody one-on-one, and they loved him. He was so eager to know about them! And he already had Party-official friends, after his year as chairman; and he knew all the oilmen, and a lot of fellows in business; and old neighbors, guys who’d drifted down from Yale ... no one ever slipped off his screen. And after every dinner, every barbecue or picnic, Bush’d get back on his plane, and ask his area chairman: “Who’re the ten people I wanna thank in Pecos?” And he’d do those ten notes before he was halfway home. Back in Houston, he’d do a few dozen more, banging them out on his own machine, with typos and x-outs and other endearing steno foibles, all explained in the top-right corner of the note, where he’d put: “Self-typed by GB.”
Well, it worked like a charm. As did the Bush Bandwagon, a busful of friends dropped off in some neighborhood, working door-to-door from lists the volunteers had prepared ... and not just in River Oaks or Tanglewood, but anywhere there were Republicans. They’d work in couples—safer that way—and Bar’d go with George’s friend, a sweet-natured insurance man named Jack Steel. Jack was a bit older, and Bar already had her white hair, and everybody thought she must be Jack’s wife—they used to laugh about that. They laughed about so many things: one man came to the door in his underpants; one woman hawked up a big gob, spat it into the flowerpot; once, the bus lost Bar and Jack, and they sat on a curb under a streetlight till ten o’clock ... but she loved it. She became a campaigner. It wasn’t politics with her—it was just for George. Her attitude was simple: it was anything he wanted to do.
Sometimes, they’d load up the bus and carry the whole show hundreds of miles across the state. They’d carry along a cowboy band, the Black Mountain Boys, who’d draw a crowd that Bush would ply with lemonade ... and they’d dress up the gals in red, white, and blue, with white skimmer hats that said BUSH BELLES on the bands, and sashes with painted bluebonnets, that read BLUEBONNET BELLES FOR BUSH. Bar made purses for all the Bush Belles with a needlepoint elephant, and BUSH in big white letters. She must have made a hundred—the steady volunteers got handbags, too.
It was mostly volunteers in the big Houston office, an abandoned ballet school in an old loft on Main Street. The place was grungy, but the mirrors on the long walls made it look like there were hundreds of workers. And you couldn’t beat the rent ... or the maintenance: whenever anything broke down—plumbing, air conditioning ... happened all the time—instructions were to call George’s friend Bake. His daddy owned the building. Bake was a local lawyer—husband of a Bush Belle—James A. Baker III. Aleene Smith came over from the Party office, to keep the operation in line. (Anyway, she couldn’t have stayed with the Party: when George resigned as County Chairman, the Birchers took over ... Kernel Napalm at the helm ... their first act was to throw out every scrap of paper that mentioned George, or Bush for Senate.)
Houston was the biggest operation in the state. (C. Fred Chambers worked from Houston: he was Finance Chairman. The Bush family worked from Houston, too: George W.—Junior—seventeen that year, poured his heart into that campaign, all summer.) But Bush also set up a statewide office in the capital, Austin. He wouldn’t concede any bit of the state—not the Negro wards of Houston, or Dallas; not even the machine-Democrat Mexican shantytowns of the Rio Grande Valley—why shouldn’t the GOP get Latin votes? Why couldn’t Bush have friends there, too? ... In Midland, heart of the oil patch, it seemed the whole town was out for Bush. Two weeks after his announcement, they scheduled a rally, strung a huge BUSH banner right across Wall Street; thirty oil wives and daughters dressed as Bush Belles; they rented the auditorium at San Jacinto Junior High—packed the place! A thousand people came ... in Midland! George’s local chairman, Martin Allday, an old friend, an oil and gas lawyer, did the introducing that night:
“Ladies and gentlemen ... the only man I have personally known, who I thought should one day be President ...”
But Bush was a long way from President—even Senator. There were 254 counties in Texas (in an area wider than New York to Chicago; longer than Chicago to Birmingham), and 200 of them never had a real Republican organization. Bush probably worked through half himself, and he had an amazing personal grasp of his affairs: by June ’64, when he’d won a plurality in the primary, and beat Jack Cox head to head in a run-off (cleaned his clock: won better than sixty percent!); by the time Martin Allday left his law practice in Midland and moved to Austin to take over campaign management, Bush could run through the state, without any notes, county by county, knew the names of major supporters in each. Problem was, the list wasn’t long enough. And by that time, Kennedy was
dead, LBJ was President—he’d clobber Goldwater in Texas ... and his name at the top of the ticket would pull thousands of extra Democrats to the polls, to give their favorite son his own full term in the White House.
Still, Bush was sure he could pull it off. He could feel things changing, everywhere he went. Bush for a Greater Texas! ... Bush for a Greater America! ... George Bush was the youth, the future: his brochures showed a bold young man charging into a crowd, his suitcoat slung over one shoulder ... it was the style of “vigor,” the style of a Kennedy. And he was sure he knew the people—he made thousands of new friends, he could feel it ... they liked him! If he could just hang the lib-rull label on Yarborough ... if he could just show the people that old phony was a giveaway artist ... if he could just attack hard enough, long enough. ... That was George’s method, from the start. That’s what state Party leaders had told him to do: attack, and keep attacking.
Alas, he was not that good on attack. It never seemed natural with him, no matter how many times he did it. The general election was all stump speeches, six to eight a day, with plane or bus trips in between. After weeks of this, Bush had a standard speech: Sukarno, the UN, foreign aid, taxes, the oil industry ... but it never added up to a picture of Bush, or any kind of message—except Yarborough was too lib-rull. When he’d get onto Yarborough, Bush’s voice would start to climb, his hands would leap up and slash the air—you couldn’t tell where the hell he was going, except in a general drift to the right. And the farther right he drifted, the more frantic he became: Bush always screamed and sawed the air harder when he had to convince himself that he believed. ...
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