by Kitty Kelley
Tom recalled thinking to himself, “This guy thinks he is such a cuntsman, God’s gift to women. He was all duded up in his cowboy boots. It was sort of annoying seeing all these people who thought they were hot shit just because they were from Texas.”
Behind his back they called George “the Texas soufflé,” because, as Archibald said, “he was all puffed up and full of hot air.”
As “campaign coordinator,” his official title in the newspapers, Bush was supposed to stay in phone contact with campaign managers in Alabama’s sixty-seven counties and handle the distribution of all campaign materials. These materials included a pamphlet accusing Blount’s opponent, Sparkman, of being soft on race. The material also included a doctored tape from a radio debate distorting Sparkman’s position on busing, making him look as if he favored forced busing. Such a position in the Deep South at that time was political suicide. Sparkman was forced to deny a series of false charges linking him to George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate tainted as a “liberal.” The race-baiting tactics would be repeated years later when George joined forces with Lee Atwater to run his father’s campaign in 1988, which featured the Willie Horton ads, and again when George ran against John McCain in the South Carolina primary.
As an “obligated reservist” in 1972, George was required to continue his duty in the National Guard no matter where he was living. Weeks after he moved to Alabama, he applied for transfer from Texas to an Air Reserve squadron in Montgomery, but his application was rejected. The Alabama outfit did not fly and did no drills. “We met just one weeknight a month,” said the commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel Reese R. Bricken. “We were only a postal unit. We had no airplanes. We had no pilots. We had no nothing.”
This left George without a Guard unit in Montgomery. So he did nothing for May, June, July, and August of 1972. “He should have commuted back to Houston to perform his duty,” said Robert Rogers. “That’s what other Guardsmen did in the same situation.”
Bush knew he could not fly again until he took a physical, so he requested a nonflying transfer of duties for September, October, and November 1972 to the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group in Montgomery. Permission was granted, and he was ordered to report to Lieutenant Colonel William Turnipseed. But George never showed up. Neither Colonel Turnipseed nor his administrative officer, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Lott, remembered First Lieutenant Bush.
“Had he reported in, I would have had some recollection and I do not,” Turnipseed told The Boston Globe. “I had been in Texas, done my flight training there. If we had a first lieutenant from Texas, I would have remembered.”
The Texas Air National Guard assumed that George was reporting in Alabama. In an annual evaluation report for May 1972 through April 1973, one of his supervising officers, Lieutenant Colonel William D. Harris Jr., wrote: “Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit during the period of this report.” He noted that Bush “had cleared this base on 15, May 1972, and has been performing equivalent training in a non-flying role with the 187th Tac Recon Gp at Dannelly ANG base, Alabama.” Bush’s second supervising officer in Texas, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian, wrote: “I concur with the comments of the reporting official.” The Albama National Guard has no documents pertaining to George W. Bush and no reports of him ever performing his Guard duty.
After the Blount debacle, George returned to Houston, and a few weeks later he flew to Washington, D.C., to spend the Christmas holidays with his family. He was twenty-six years old. During that time he went out drinking with his favorite brother, sixteen-year-old Marvin. Driving home that evening, George smashed into several garbage cans before making his way into the driveway. He swaggered into the house with the bravado of someone who had drunk too much, and there was his father, sober and unsmiling.
“You want to go mano a mano right here?” George junior challenged.
Some have suggested this incident symbolized young George’s defensiveness in the presence of his far more successful father. George shrugged it off years later. “It was probably the result of two stiff bourbons,” he said. “Nothing more.”
Friends of the senior Bushes say their frustration with the carousing of their eldest son was no secret. “I remember the old man saying he didn’t ever think young George would get it together,” said Cody Shearer. “He talked about it all the time.”
“I covered the Popster [George H. W. Bush] in Houston and have known him since 1970,” said the journalist John Mashek. “He was always shaking his head in despair over what to do about George junior.”
At the time of the “mano a mano” incident, his father’s concern was over the lack of judgment that had prompted George to take his underage brother out drinking and to drive home under the influence of alcohol.
Once again George Herbert Walker Bush picked up the telephone. This time he called John L. White, formerly with the Houston Oilers. Ambassador Bush said that he wanted his son to perform community service with Project PULL (Professional United Leadership League), a mentoring program for inner-city youth started by White and his teammate Ernie “Big Cat” Ladd.
“John knew George Bush’s father very well,” said White’s widow, Otho Raye White. “They wanted to build his [son’s] character at the time.”
George Herbert Walker Bush, who was on the PULL board, thanked John White a year later by using his influence to get PULL additional funding from Congress. An internal memo in the Gerald R. Ford Library to the Honorable George Bush dated August 16, 1974, states:
We have arranged for John White to receive some new guidelines and assistance from the National office.
New LEAA [Law Enforcement Alliance of America] legislation pending before the House and Senate Conference Committee will include direct funding authority for youth offenders and PULL related programs.
Will keep you advised.
John Calhoun, Staff Assistant to the President
Young George reported for work in January 1973 at PULL headquarters: a warehouse on McGowen Street in Houston’s tough Third Ward. “His dad and John White brought him right to the black belt,” said Ladd. “Any white guy that showed up on McGowen was gonna get caught in some tough situations. You better be able to handle yourself.”
The PULL program offered kids up to seventeen years of age sports, crafts, field trips, free snacks, rap sessions, tutoring for those who had been expelled, and big-name mentors from the athletic, entertainment, business, and political worlds. The summer after George senior negotiated a “conditional release” from Andover rather than expulsion for Marvin, he sent him to Houston to join George at PULL. The bad Bush brothers were the only two white boys in the place.
“They stood out like a sore thumb,” said Muriel Simmons Henderson, one of PULL’s senior counselors. “John White was a good friend of their father. He told us that the father wanted George W. to see the other side of life. He asked John if he would put him in there.”
Ernie Ladd recalled young George as “a super, super guy . . . If he was a stinker, I’d say he was a stinker. But everybody loved him so much. He had a way with people . . . They didn’t want him to leave.”
George stayed only seven months at PULL before he announced he had been accepted at Harvard Business School. On September 5, 1973, he requested his discharge from the Texas Air National Guard to go to graduate school. Having served five years, four months, and five days toward his six-year obligation, he received an honorable discharge. He would receive a second honorable discharge from the Air Force Reserve in November 1974 at the end of his six-month penalty.
When George arrived at Harvard to join the class of 1975, his father was running the Republican National Committee for Richard Nixon at the height of Watergate. George, who espoused his father’s politics, found himself in a hostile political environment where Nixon was considered the Antichrist.
“Cambridge was a miserable place then to be a Republican,” recalled George’s aunt Nan Bush Ellis, who lived in Massachusetts,
a state known as a Democratic stronghold. In the environs of the town that surrounded Harvard, only four hundred people were registered Republicans. George spent many weekends with his aunt and her family outside of Boston, lambasting Harvard’s “smug guilt-ridden affected liberals.”
“I remember seeing Georgie at the Harvard Business School,” said Torbert Macdonald, his classmate from Andover, “but he looked so lost and forlorn I didn’t have the heart to say hello.”
Most of the class of 1975 at the B-school knew they were headed for Wall Street, but not George. “He was trying to figure out what to do with his life,” said his classmate Al Hubbard. “He was there to get prepared, but he didn’t know for what.”
Other classmates were not quite as generous in assessing George’s aptitude. “He was remarkably inarticulate,” said Steve Arbeit. “God, so inarticulate it was frightening. The reason I say that he is dumber than dumb is not that I saw his test scores or his grades; it’s the comments he made in the classes we had together that scared me . . . He was totally unimpressive in an atmosphere where you were judged completely on your class participation.
“There’s always a layer of kids who are in the school because their parents are somebody. It’s almost a legacy sort of thing. Most of them acted like everybody else, except for George, who would not say hello to someone like me if we passed in the hall . . . I’m not the same social class. My father is not chairman of something . . . So unlike most of the people who try to pretend you-don’t-know-who-my-dad-is type of thing, George was the opposite.”
Ruth Owades, chairman of Calyx and Corolla, a flower catalog company, and a member of George’s class, remembered people pointing him out. “At a place like Harvard Business School, you always knew who the sons or daughters of famous people were—but mostly the sons. And then there were the rest of us.”
Alf Nucifora, another classmate, recalled George as a “nonentity with a rich boy’s attitude who obviously got into school because of the divine right of kings . . . You did not see a great future for this man. There’s no way that any sane individual could ever have made such a prediction.”
During his first year George came to the attention of Yoshi Tsurumi when the macroeconomics professor announced his plan to show the film The Grapes of Wrath, based on John Steinbeck’s book about the Great Depression. “I wanted to give the class a visual reference for poverty and a sense of historical empathy,” Tsurumi explained. “George Bush came up to me and said, ‘Why are you going to show us that Commie movie?’
“I laughed because I thought he was kidding, but he wasn’t. After we viewed the film, I called on him to discuss the Depression and how he thought it affected people. He said, ‘Look. People are poor because they are lazy.’ A number of the students pounced on him and demanded that he support his statement with facts and statistics. He quickly backed down because he could not sustain his broadside.”
Professor Tsurumi continued: “His strong prejudices soon set him apart from the rest of the students. This has nothing to do with politics, because most business students are conservative, but they are not inhumane or unprincipled. Unlike most of the others in class, George Bush came across as totally lacking compassion, with no sense of history, completely devoid of social responsibility, and unconcerned with the welfare of others. Even among Republicans his kind was rare. He had no shame about his views, and that’s when the rest of the class started treating him like a clown—not someone funny, but someone whose views were not worthy of consideration . . . I did not judge him to be stupid, just spoiled and undisciplined . . . I gave him a ‘low pass.’ Of the one hundred students in that class, George Bush was in the bottom 10 percent. He was so abysmal that I once asked him how he ever got accepted in the first place. He said, ‘I had lots of help.’ I laughed, and then inquired about his military service. He said he had been in the Texas National Guard. I said he was very lucky not to have had to go to Vietnam. He said, ‘My dad fixed it so that I got into the Guard. I got an early discharge to come here.’”
From the eight hundred people in the class of 1975, George stood out, and not because of who his father was. “I don’t remember if he was one of the Texans who had Aggie horns on the front of his big American-made car—most of them did—but I can still see him in his cowboy boots and leather flight jacket walking into macroeconomics,” recalled one classmate. “He sat in the back of the class, chewing tobacco and spitting it into a dirty paper cup . . . He was one red-assed Texan who made sure he was in your Yankee face and up your New England nose.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I would pay to do this job,” Barbara told the reporter from the New York Post. She twirled around the State Room of the Waldorf-Astoria, pointing out the paintings on loan from the Whitney Museum. “That’s a Bellows, a Sargent . . . and you did notice the two Gilbert Stuarts? In our own rotunda. You did get that. Didn’t you?” She reeled off all the parties she had attended as the wife of the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.
“Of course we went to the wedding,” she said, referring to the White House nuptials of Tricia Nixon in the Rose Garden. “Then last week we had a reception of about 50 late one afternoon. African ambassadors of five nations came to meet 12 black college presidents and their wives who are going to spend six weeks in Africa. And we took six people from the Japanese embassy . . . to Greenwich . . . Before that we had a seated dinner of 36. And we had six Mets over yesterday . . . They had lunch with George at the UN and came over here in the afternoon.”
Barbara loved the social whirl and never wanted it to end. But after President Nixon was reelected, in 1972, he called for the resignations of all political appointees. George had made twenty-eight major speeches during the campaign, so he was assured another position in the administration, but he didn’t know what it would be.
“If it’s the Republican National Committee, promise me you won’t take it,” Barbara said as he was leaving to meet with the President. “Anything but the R.N.C.”
The last thing Barbara wanted was to descend from her lofty perch as an Ambassador’s wife and chase around the rubber-chicken circuit as the wife of a party hack. Having spent twelve months dealing with diplomats at the United Nations, George fancied himself an expert in foreign policy, and he longed to be named Secretary of State or, at the very least, Deputy Secretary. In a letter to the President promoting himself as a diplomat, George said: “I have been dealing happily, and I hope effectively, with the top international leadership.”
The President, who described George as “a total Nixon man,” had other ideas. While cursing “Ivy League bastards,” Nixon knew George to be one Ivy Leaguer he could count on for slavish loyalty. “Eliminate the politicians,” he told his chief of staff, “except George Bush. He’ll do anything for the cause.” H. R. Haldeman agreed. “[George] takes our line beautifully.” On November 20, 1972, the President invited George to Camp David and offered him the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee. George accepted on the spot.
The next day, after talking to Barbara, he wrote to the President:
Frankly, your choice for me came as quite a surprise particularly to Barbara. The rarefied atmosphere of international affairs plus the friendships in New York and the Cabinet seem threatened to her. She is convinced that all our friends in Congress, in public life, in God knows where—will say, “George screwed it up at the U.N. and the President has loyally found a suitable spot.” Candidly, there will be some of this. But—here’s my answer—Your first choice was the Republican National Committee. I will do it!
Previous George H.W. Bush biographers, all handpicked and approved by Bush, have written that George “very reluctantly” accepted the “unenviable job” as if he were a servant beholden to his master. “It was to be . . . a sacrifice on the altar of loyalty,” wrote Nicholas King. “It was . . . more of a political albatross,” wrote Herbert Parmet. “It was . . . like being made Captain of the Titanic,” wrote Fitzhugh Green.
Not so
. George might have indicated such feelings after Watergate became an international scandal and forced Nixon’s resignation, but at the time he was offered the Republican National Committee, he did not hesitate. Not for one second. He knew that a President was made by a hundred thousand chicken dinners and a million handshakes in small towns across America. According to unpublished entries in his diary, he saw the RNC as an important stepping-stone. Not only was he serving the President he admired; he was meeting the people he needed to know in order to make another tilt at national office. Looking toward 1976, George knew that being on a first-name basis with Republican National Committeemen, precinct chairmen, and major fund-raisers was crucial if he was to position himself for the presidency.
William J. Clark (Yale 1945W), who was in Skull and Bones with George, outlined the strategy he was to follow in a “Dear Poppy” letter dated January 31, 1973:
Tactics: The first step is to name Bush as Chairman of the Republican Party, fresh from his prestigious assignment at the U.N. For two years Bush travels around the country meeting every state and county chairman, establishing his credentials, charming the big money amateurs, and setting up a lot of debts during the ’74 campaign for later collection.
George’s position at the Republican National Committee did nothing for the social aspirations of his wife, and Barbara did not hide her disappointment from the President. The writer Gore Vidal recalled a conversation with his friend Murray Kempton shortly after one of the journalist’s periodic lunches with Richard Nixon. Kempton had mentioned George Bush, and according to Vidal, Nixon had responded: “Total light-weight. Nothing there—sort of person you appoint to things—but now that Barbara, she’s something else again! She’s really vindictive!” Vidal characterized the comment as “the highest Nixonian compliment.”
