by Kitty Kelley
Prescott said he intended to continue his service on the Yale Corporation, which would bring him to New Haven at least once a month. Then he addressed a subject of particular concern: “I would like you to sit down with me sometime alone and explain why it was that the Yale faculty was not with us in this election. I noted that the Harvard faculty was with us. This should be purely an impersonal conversation. I feel that I really need a better understanding of the point of view of that wonderful faculty regarding politics.”
The next day he packed his straw hat and headed for Washington.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Barbara had not noticed the bruises on her little girl’s arms and legs, but she was puzzled by Robin’s continuing listlessness and wondered why she seemed to have so little energy. “It seemed wrong for her to be that exhausted . . . She had been a normal three-year-old, and suddenly her schedule for the day was to lie down someplace.”
Weeks before, on February 11, 1953, Barbara had given birth to the Bushes’ third child, John Ellis Bush, known as Jebby, and the baby was already eating more than his three-year-old sister, who only picked at her food. So Barbara made an appointment for Robin to see the family’s pediatrician. Dr. Dorothy Wyvell examined the youngster, asked about the black-and-blue contusions, and took a blood test. She told Barbara to take the little girl home and come back in the afternoon with George to discuss the test results.
Robin had been born in Compton, California, and after a year in the state the Bushes moved to Texas. They lived in Odessa for six months, and then moved to Midland, where George and his neighbor John Overbey, an oil and gas lease broker, conceived the idea of starting their own oil-exploration business. They wanted to create a company to purchase mineral rights next to properties that were being drilled for oil.
Typically, large oil companies bought up leases at a fixed price to explore for minerals. The landowners retained royalties, which entitled them to a percentage of the oil found on their properties. An independent company, such as Bush-Overbey, would buy a percentage of the landowners’ royalties; if oil was found, the landowner got his royalty, and the independent company got whatever royalty it had negotiated with the landowner. If the independent company dug a dry well, the company lost its investment, but the landowner was protected by rental fees from the independent company as well as the big oil company. George Bush described this high-risk business as speculating in royalty percentages.
In a rush to get rich, George told Neil Mallon about his plans to leave and start this new business with John Overbey. Neil, who had given George his start at Dresser with the expectation that he would one day run the company, encouraged him to go out on his own. Mallon even took the time to explain how to structure and finance an independent oil company. George knew that he would need a minimum of $1 million to get started, so he turned to the family’s financier, Herbie Walker. Using the designated high-risk portion of assets he invested for a group of large British trust funds, Uncle Herbie provided $350,000 in capital. Eugene Meyer, the owner of The Washington Post and a client of Brown Brothers Harriman, provided $100,000, half of which was in the name of his son-in-law, Philip L. Graham. John Overbey recalled that Prescott Bush provided another $50,000—a fact George never mentioned to biographers. The omission suggests his reluctance to be seen as anything less than a “self-made” success.
“Most big investors were in the East,” George said, “so we spent as much time scouring the big cities for funds as we did the farmlands for oil rights.”
Bush-Overbey was not selling a tangible product, simply a speculation in oil leases and mineral rights. Their real business was providing a tax shelter for their wealthy investors. As George explained it: “To get money, we’d have to attract investors outside the business, people willing to take a risk on an oil venture. If we struck oil, our investors would get a percentage of the income, depending on the amount of their investment; if the well proved dry, they could write off their losses.”
He traveled constantly to woo Uncle Herbie’s rich East Coast contacts and throughout Texas researching courthouses for land records. He happened to be in the Ector County courthouse, twenty miles from Midland, when Barbara called to say that they had an emergency appointment with Robin’s pediatrician that afternoon.
Dr. Wyvell greeted the Bushes with tears in her eyes. She sat them down and said their child had leukemia, a cancer that floods the bloodstream with millions of abnormal white blood cells.
“Robin has the highest white blood cell count I’ve ever seen,” the doctor said.
“Well, let’s do something,” said George. “What do we do?”
“George, you can’t do anything about leukemia.”
“There’s nothing you can’t do something about,” George insisted.
“There is no cure for leukemia,” said Dr. Wyvell. “I advise you to let nature take its course. Spare yourself the agony of treatment for this is an advanced case.”
In 1953, nearly every child diagnosed with leukemia died within six months. Dr. Wyvell gave Robin three weeks.
“The doctor gave us the best advice anyone could have given, which, of course, we didn’t take,” recalled Barbara many years later. “She said, ‘Number one, don’t tell anyone. Number two, don’t treat her. You should take her home; make life as easy as possible for her’ . . . George said, ‘No way.’ He immediately dropped me home, went straight over to my friend Liz Fowler’s house, and said, ‘Liz, please go down and see Barbara. The doctor says Robin has leukemia.’ So we broke the first rule before we got going. When he got home later that day, he called his uncle, who worked at Sloan-Kettering hospital in New York.”
Dr. John M. Walker, the brother of George’s mother, Dorothy, had joined Memorial Sloan-Kettering in 1952 as a clinical assistant in surgery. Acknowledged as the best athlete in his exceedingly athletic family, he had played championship football, baseball, squash, and golf. Then he was struck with polio in 1950 and lost most of the use of his limbs, eventually becoming bound to a wheelchair.
George was forever grateful to his Uncle John for using his influence to get Robin admitted to Sloan-Kettering for the experimental cancer treatments that extended her life a few months. “I hated the chemotherapy, for her, but it was very good for us,” said Barbara. “We had a chance to work out, to tell her we loved her.”
Years later, when George became President and was in a position to do something significant for his uncle, he nominated Dr. Walker’s son John M. Walker Jr. to a federal judgeship, appointing him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. “It’s the least I can do for someone whose father did so much for me,” George told one of his White House lawyers. “Besides, Johnny’s as well qualified as anyone else for the position.”
In addition to his own handicap, Dr. Walker had two daughters born with Down syndrome. His most important influence on George was giving him sensitivity to the needs of the disabled that he might not otherwise have developed. For most of his life George remained insensitive to the imperative of racial justice and had a consistently less than admirable record on civil rights. He did, however, become a champion for the disabled. His admiration for his uncle, who had been crippled at the height of his career, led George to his finest hour as President: on July 26, 1990, he signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, only three weeks before his Uncle John, then eighty-one, died of complications from an aneurysm.
Not all members of the Bush family were quite so sensitive to the issue. When the ADA bill was first introduced in Congress in the late 1980s, George was Vice President under Ronald Reagan. His younger brother Jonathan, named after Dr. Walker, happened to be visiting Washington during a Senate debate on the legislation, first proposed by Connecticut Senator Lowell Weicker, who had graduated from Yale with Jonathan in 1953. That evening Jonathan returned to New York City to attend his first board meeting of American Heritage, the magazine then owned by his father’s good friend Samuel P. Reed. The meeting was held in a private dining
room of the Knickerbocker Club, where the younger Bush was introduced to the board of directors. Everyone applauded as he stood to say a few words.
“Well, I’ve just come up from Washington, where I was listening to Teddy Kennedy make a speech for the crips,” he said, using a pejorative term for “cripples.”
There was a moment of stunned silence until the editor Byron Dobell spoke up, reprimanding Jonathan for mocking the disabled. “Even if you think that, you should not say it,” Dobell said.
After the meeting, one of the directors approached the editor.
“Boy, that was something—speaking up like that to the brother of the Vice President of the United States.”
“It never crossed my mind to let it pass,” said Dobell. “I thought what he said was preposterous, and for grown men to sit around and not say anything would have been even more preposterous.”
George might have remained as unenlightened as his brother had it not been for John Walker’s intervention on behalf of his dying daughter. As he wrote to his friend Paul Dorsey:
He was a great cancer surgeon . . . a strong purposeful man. I told him of our local doc’s advice and he said, “You have no choice—none at all—you must treat this child. You must do all you can to keep her alive.” And he went on to tell me of the strides in the field and of the importance of hope. So we treated her and we watched her die before our eyes, but we also saw the wonders of remission and the dedication of the nurses and doctors, and we saw progress and we knew his advice was right. Six months later when it was all over—I thought back with gratitude for this sensible advice—it was tough on Barbara—I guess the toughest assignment a mother could have—for she was there for the bone marrow tests—the ordeals of blood. Someone had to look into Robin’s eyes and give her comfort and love and somehow, Paul, I didn’t have the guts.
The day after George’s conversation with Dr. Walker, the Bushes flew Robin to New York City to begin the experimental treatments. For the next six months she was, in the words of Epictetus, “a little spirit bearing up a corpse.”
Years later Barbara would remember the plane ride from Texas, because up to that point she had had a history of getting airsick. “But the first time we took Robin to New York, I got on and off the plane and didn’t get sick. Robin needed me, and I wasn’t thinking about myself. I haven’t been airsick since.”
Barbara left her six-year-old boy, Georgie, and her newborn baby, Jeb, in the care of neighbors while she poured herself into shepherding her daughter through the harrowing miasma of bone-marrow biopsies, blood transfusions, and chemotherapy. In New York City, she stayed with Ganny and Gampy Walker in their sumptuous Sutton Place penthouse, only a few blocks from Sloan-Kettering. Eventually George’s mother sent a nurse to Midland to take care of George and his two sons, who moved back into their own small home on West Ohio Street. Barbara spent months in New York, concentrating solely on her young daughter. She knew Robin was going to die; she was too much of a realist not to accept that fact. But there was also the hope for the occasional remission, a temporary respite from the rampaging cancer that was devouring the little girl’s cells. Barbara threw all she had toward that fleeting incentive, and from time to time she was rewarded. On one occasion, Robin felt well enough to be taken out of the hospital to Sutton Place to visit her great-grandparents for a day. Another time she went to Greenwich to see her grandparents. Barbara also took the little girl home to Midland for a few weeks, but Robin hemorrhaged there and had to be flown back to New York. Her last trip out of the hospital was to Kennebunkport, in the summer, where she saw her brothers.
During the time of Robin’s illness Bush-Overbey was making only a modest profit, but George’s silk carpet ride into the oil business had drawn the attention of Hugh and Bill Liedtke, two slow-talking, quick-thinking lawyers from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who specialized in forming oil partnerships. They had offices down the hall from the Bush-Overbey Oil Development Company in the Midland National Bank building, and the four men and their families soon became friends and began socializing regularly.
“There wasn’t much else to do in Midland then but get together for barbecues,” recalled Hugh Liedtke. At that time, the small dust bowl of a town had a population of twenty-five thousand people, a few churches, a lot of saloons, one movie theater, and one brothel.
“George put that whorehouse to good use when Dresser decided to have a board meeting in Midland,” recalled Stephen Thayer, Neil Mallon’s stepson. “George had to make the arrangements for the board, and there was no hotel in Midland high-rent enough for that group at the time, so he rented the whorehouse, where the board and their wives stayed for a week.”
In 1953, Bush, Overbey, and the Liedtke brothers decided to merge their businesses and create an oil company that they named after the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata. “There was a Zapata movie playing at the time, starring Marlon Brando,” recalled Liedtke. “We needed a name, something that would pique people’s curiosity, and we thought that sounded pretty good.”
First they formed Zapata Petroleum; a year later they created Zapata Offshore Company. After George severed his business relations with them, the Liedtkes merged the original Zapata into South Penn Oil Company. With the help of J. Paul Getty, one of the firm’s largest stockholders, Hugh Liedtke engineered a friendly takeover that became Pennzoil. He would later acquire Getty Oil Company, sue Texaco into bankruptcy, and refuse to settle with the bankruptcy lawyers until 1987, when he convinced a jury that Texaco should pay Pennzoil $3 billion. George had indeed found himself one tough business partner. Liedtke was so tough he would eventually even butt heads with George’s great benefactor, Uncle Herbie.
In the beginning, the decision was made that each side of the partnership would be responsible for raising $500,000. So, once again, knowing that Uncle Herbie would never deny him anything, George tapped the family bank for his share. Herbie Walker was so besotted with his nephew that for the first twenty years of George’s marriage, he and Barbara repeatedly vacationed with Herbie and his wife, Mary, with Uncle Herbie always paying the way.
George Herbert Walker Jr. revered his namesake nephew to the point that it made his own sons uncomfortable. “I was annoyed by all the energy George was receiving that should have gone to my brother,” said Ray Walker, a psychiatrist and the youngest of Herbie’s three children. “Hero worship of someone outside himself was very much a part of my father’s makeup. First it was George. Then, when Dad owned the Mets [1960–77], it was Tom Seaver. Dad had an unlived life. He latched on to George because they both believed in money and power as the priorities in life.
“I remember my Yale roommate, Bob Gow, who ran Zapata for a while, telling me how Dad would call George all the time, and George would hold the phone away from his ear so he wouldn’t have to listen to Dad drone on and on and on. He’d just say, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ But that’s the kind of guy George is. He’s ingratiating and likable . . . It’s impossible not to like him . . . but he’s definitely a yes-man. Dad loved that.”
Herbie Walker realized that George’s principal role as a partner in Zapata was to be a pipeline to capital, so the investment banker raised $1.3 million for his nephew to start up his new venture. That sum included investments from the Rockefellers and the Astors. Uncle Herbie, who also made money from these transactions, would continue to be George’s golden goose throughout his business career. In 1990, The New Republic placed the cumulative amount he had raised for George’s various oil ventures over the years at $7 million.
The Liedtkes had their own access to big money through their father, who was chief counsel to Gulf Oil. George’s original partner, John Overbey, unfortunately did not have a money spout in his family, so he was eased out of the partnership when George and his uncle created an entity called Walker-Bush Corporation, which became the owner of Bush-Overbey.
Zapata Petroleum plunged $850,000 of the original investment into a single oil field, and to everyone’s amazement the gamble paid off. Th
e oil came gushing in. As Bill Liedtke told the Houston Business Journal in 1999: “We drilled 130 wells and never had a dry hole.”
During their daughter’s illness, while George was flying back and forth from Texas to New York on the private planes of his rich oil friends, Barbara became a maternal martinet, laying down the law to her children, her husband, her friends, her relatives, and even her formidable mother-in-law. “I wouldn’t let George junior play with Robin because she bruised so easily,” Barbara said. “In fact, I kept the kids apart almost that whole time. We didn’t tell Georgie, because we thought he was too young to know [that his sister was dying]. Actually, I was afraid he would tell Robin and I didn’t want her to know. I was very firm at the time and, I suspect, rather tough. I made up my mind that she was going to be happy. If anybody cried in Robin’s hospital room, I’d ask them gently to please leave the room. Poor George. It just killed him. I’d have to say, ‘If you cry, you can’t stay.’” She said that her husband and his mother were the worst offenders. “They were just too softhearted.”
Barbara was forced many times to reexamine her decision not to tell her oldest son about his sister’s terminal illness. “I don’t know if that was right or wrong,” she told The Washington Post in 1999. “I mean I really don’t but I know he [Georgie] said to me several times, ‘You know, why didn’t you tell me?’ Well, it wouldn’t have made a difference . . . [And besides] we thought he was too young to cope with it.”
Barbara was implacably strong during Robin’s illness, whereas George was emotionally fragile. So much so that his good friend Lud Ashley stepped in as a kind of surrogate to support Barbara, visiting Robin on a regular basis and looking in on the little girl at night when Barbara had returned to the Walkers’ penthouse to sleep.
