What It Takes

by Richard Ben Cramer

  For a while, marriage only stepped up the family pressure. Greenwich and Rye were ten miles apart, and now, of course, they were in constant communication. At Christmas, and like family conclaves, Poppy and Bar would drive back and forth for breakfast at one house, lunch at another, a stop with the uncles (Poppy didn’t like to disappoint), eggnog here and supper there ... like Ping-Pong balls in a closed room! One day, when she was very pregnant with Georgie, and visiting in Greenwich with Pres and Dottie, Bar hauled herself out of a chair, and announced she had to visit in Rye, her parents ... she was expected. ... Pres Bush said sternly, but just as a joke: “Did we give you permission to visit those strangers?” It was no joke to Bar. She dissolved in tears.

  She never really said to Pop: “Let’s get out ...” She didn’t have to. That was one of the great things about him, about them together. There was so much they just knew ... and from the beginning. Sometimes, people asked her: How did Poppy propose? Well, he didn’t. They just started planning. Of course, she didn’t propose children either. She just took care of it.

  She knew Poppy was as eager as she to get out on his own. Maybe more: he’d been to war, he’d seen the world. Now he was hustling through Yale in two and a half years, but he wasn’t just going to scrape through. With his straight A’s in economics, letters in soccer and baseball, as the last man tapped for Skull and Bones—only fifteen chosen, the best of the best—he could have been a lock for a Rhodes scholarship, an extra year of study at a university in England. But what was the point? George Bush wasn’t interested in more theory. Anyway, a family of three would never make it through a year on the stipend. Poppy would have to ask his folks for money—that’s another thing he wanted to get past. He wanted to be out on his own—Bar and he even talked about farming, the most self-sufficient family life ... but after they found out how much it would cost for land, seed, stock, equipment ... well, Poppy wasn’t going to ask Pres for that kind of dough. No way!

  So, it was business. That’s where the action was, anyway. With the rationing lifted and factories switching to production of cars, washers, fridges, televisions! ... things were on the move ... fortunes being made. The wave of strikes that followed the war was mostly over now, and the engine of U.S. business was never going to sink back to the sleepy sputter of the thirties. If the theories in his economics class meant anything, that was the lesson: America owned the world’s markets as no other nation had before. (If the government would get its hands off the levers, there was no telling how fast, how far, the great ship of progress could sail!) American business won the war, and now it ruled this brave new world. And here was Poppy Bush, bred to captaincy, just itching to work his way to the helm. Wasn’t it great how it turned out?

  But he had to start somewhere, and fast. He was a senior already! Procter & Gamble had a trainee program; he talked to their recruiters, but ... no soap. Lots of fellows were going into banking, or stocks, pure business, the capitalism of capital. And that would have been easy for Pop. Gampy Walker had split away from the Harrimans and formed his own investment bank, G.H. Walker & Co. His son, Herbie, was running the company now. He would have leapt to take Poppy on. For that matter, there were whispers that Brown Brothers Harriman might even bend its own strict rule on nepotism. ... Pres Bush’s son was a star!

  But that wasn’t the way: not for Poppy. If he’d wanted to play it safe and sound, he never would have signed up to fly on his eighteenth birthday: could have started Yale five years ago. Where was the adventure in that?

  In the stiff-upper-lip world of the Walkers, no one tried to talk to Poppy about his choices: certainly not! ... Unless he asked, which he wouldn’t. Of course, they’d do anything for him: they were so eager, it was almost uncomfortable. When Poppy and Bar would show up in Maine, it was like the prodigal son had returned: Kill the Fatted Calf! Uncle Herbie—the second G.H. Walker, and the second patriarch of the Point—just adored Poppy, idolized him. George Bush could do no wrong: George was a winner, a star at school, a hero in war, a pilot—the knighthood! Herbie’s dream was to fly with Poppy. Of course, Herbie didn’t know a thing about flying. He was scared to death of thunder and lightning! But he learned to fly at the close of the war, and went out to Detroit and bought an airplane. But then he started to fly it back East, and hit a snowstorm and couldn’t go on; couldn’t get back to Detroit, either. So, in the end, he landed his new plane in a cornfield and just walked away. That was the end of Herbie the Pilot.

  But it didn’t cool Herbie’s ardor, not at all. Whenever he’d hear Pop and Bar were coming up to Maine, Herbie dropped everything in a frenzy of setting up golf games, tennis matches, picnics, dinner parties. He started a whole summer baseball league ... Poppy’s coming! Everyone thought it was awful for Herbie’s own sons, Bert and Ray. Herbie was so obviously in love with their cousin. Poppy didn’t quite know what to do about it. He always tried to be extra-nice to Bert and Ray.

  It was just another thing that would be ... easier, once Poppy and Bar got away on their own. As for going into business with Herbie, in his firm, well ... that didn’t seem like a good idea.

  Pres’s great friend (and fellow Bonesman) Neil Mallon, in Cleveland, had been unofficial godfather to the Bush kids. He knew Poppy was hunting a place to start on his own. So he talked to George about the Texas oil fields: that was the place for a young man to make his fortune. Mallon was the head of Dresser Industries (Pres Bush served on the board, of course), and Dresser owned Ideco, an oil-field equipment company. Why didn’t George go out there as a trainee, learn the oil business from the ground up? Mallon didn’t have to say the rest: he didn’t have any kids of his own. ... If Poppy liked what he saw of Ideco, and Dresser, well ... there’d be opportunities.

  Poppy liked what he heard. He’d been posted to Texas in the Navy for a couple of months. It was wide open ...a whole new world ... a thousand miles away. And everything about Texas oil had the air of great doings, men and fortunes larger than life. Like everyone else of his generation, Bush had seen the stories in Life magazine, the Fortune profiles of H.L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, Sid Richardson, Eamon Carter. They were Giants in a Giant Land. ... Oil! Black Gold! ... What an adventure!

  So Poppy came back from his talk with Neil Mallon and said to Bar, he thought he’d get a job with Ideco, the International Derrick and Equipment Company. It was the oil business! ... A trainee’s job ... lots of opportunity ... starting wage just over three hundred dollars a month.

  It sounded good to Bar. Reasonably stable. And she knew Pop would do well, wherever he chose to work ... and if it didn’t turn out, well, they’d find another way. Pop was Phi Beta Kappa at Yale, after all. It’s not like they were going to another country ... were they? ... Where is this?

  “Odessa, Texas,” he said.

  Bar paused a couple of beats and then favored Poppy with a radiant smile. “I’ve always wanted,” she said, “to live in Odessa, Texas.”

  Phyllis saw him first in March, across the mess hall at Percy Jones. He was still thin, had his arm in a splint, but what she noticed was his sharp dark eyes, his high brow and thick shining hair, the strong bones in his face. Phyllis said to her friend: “Who’s that?”

  “Oh, that poor Bob Dole. He doesn’t have long to live, you know.”

  “Isn’t that sad ... such a nice-looking man.”

  Of course, her friend was behind the times: Bob Dole was going to live, and he was going to do something with that life. He was back at Percy Jones after Dr. K.’s operations, but he knew now it was just a way station.

  He wasn’t waiting anymore for a miracle. The hospital still gave him curare treatments for tremors, and therapy in the whirlpool every day, but he was working on himself in every way. He’d found himself sort of a job, selling Oldsmobiles modified for wounded war vets. He sold a couple at Percy Jones, and in the bargain, got himself a blue sedan with a left-hand gearshift. It wasn’t long till the Army put a stop to such business. But that didn’t mean Dole had to give up, to lie around
in bed, or play bridge all day.

  He and a couple of buddies were tearing through the books in the hospital library: there wasn’t anything Bob Dole didn’t want to know. At night, they’d sit up talking books, until the nurses called lights out ... at which point, they’d sneak off the ward, and steal across the street, to a coffee shop that stayed open till two. Bob was thinking about getting out of the Army, going back to school, getting a degree. He’d talked to Kelikian about it. Maybe he could be a lawyer. “Why not?” said Dr. K.

  It was March 12 when Bob showed up at the Officers’ Club dance. Phyllis and her friends had done the decoration: it was Heaven and Hell—Hell, with the pictures of devils in flames, was the bar; it was in Heaven, the dance floor, under painted clouds and angels, where Bob spotted Phyllis, sitting with a group of nurses at a table. He stood straight and tall—no splint—in his uniform, as he walked up and asked her to dance.

  “I’d love to,” she said.

  He couldn’t put his right arm around her back—not by himself. But he put it on her hip, and Phyllis stepped right in. Years later, in Russell, she’d advise their women friends: “Dance close to Bob ...” They always thought she was making a joke.

  Phyllis Holden wasn’t the kind to make jokes—not about things that mattered. She’d grown up in rural New Hampshire, a girl so tenderhearted she never could stand teasing. Sometimes, like every well-loved child, she’d do something so cute that her parents laughed with joy. But Phyllis thought they were laughing at her, and she’d start to cry. As she came of age, there was a softness about her that drew a flock of young men. But until she got to Percy Jones, she was not lucky in love.

  At the University of New Hampshire, in the new program for occupational therapy, she’d got engaged to a fellow named Joseph Bennett, who was badly infected with malaria from his days on Guadalcanal. That engagement lasted almost three years, but in the end, it fell apart. After college, in her resident training, she got involved with a young man who had osteomyelitis. That never got beyond a “serious friendship,” but her parents were horrified. “My God, Phyllis,” her mother scolded. “Why don’t you get away from these lame ducks!”

  But she loved the work. It was a new field, exciting, and Phyllis felt like a pioneer. She worked in the psychiatric wards, teaching crafts, silver and leather. She was never scared of the men. She thought even a schizophrenic would maintain some respect for a woman. And the alcoholics would protect her, if need be. Meanwhile, she was helping, she was needed, she was good at her job. In ’48, she decided to follow her college friend, Elsie Deming, to Michigan, to the Army Medical Center, where the big job was being done. She and Elsie would join the Army, they’d see the world: Phyllis had never been west of New York State. Anyway, there was not, at the moment, a love in her life to keep her in New Hampshire. When Elsie met her at the station in Battle Creek, Phyllis laughed and said, “Tell you one thing: the next time I get engaged, I’m going to get married. Just give me time to get out the invitations ...”

  She almost didn’t have time. Two days after she danced with Bob Dole, he called—nine-thirty at night!—and asked her out for a coffee. If it’d been anyone but that nice Lieutenant Dole, she wouldn’t have gone: he’d think she was sitting alone by the phone. But everybody knew Bob was a nice guy, always had a good word for everyone, had a job selling cars ... he didn’t try to flirt with the nurses, like some of the men. So, she said yes. And he told her about Russell, Kansas, and his father in the grain elevator, his brother and two sisters, and Dr. Kelikian in Chicago, and the operations. ... Then it was the Easter dance at the Officers’ Club, and more coffee dates, always at night. She had her work and he had his therapy, so it wasn’t like they spent every minute together. And Phyllis wasn’t looking for anyone special. ... But Bob was always fun, always so gracious, always opened the door of the Oldsmobile for her, always did the driving, always wanted to know about her, how she was doing. And he was brave about himself, and handsome, and smart. It was only a few weeks before she felt she wasn’t interested in a date with anyone else. Then Bob had to go to Chicago, to see Dr. K., and Phyllis went with him. Kelikian was urging Bob to go to school. He smiled at Phyllis, and said: “She can go with you and take notes.”

  In April, Bob went back to Russell for a visit, and Bina got on the phone with her sister, right away. “I think Bob’s fallen madly in love with a therapist.”

  “Really? How do you know?”

  “That’s eighty percent of his conversation! What a difference!”

  Bob was like a kid again. He’d get up in the morning, jump into his car, and drive right down Main Street. Visit with Doran and the farmers in the elevator. Stop in at Dawson’s, stay two hours! On and off the stools, over to the jukebox ... “Heyy, how ’bout some music? ...” Then back home, next door, to Kenny and Dottie. Told Dottie about the beautiful things Phyllis made with her hands. Phyllis can do this, Phyllis can do that. She’s got long dark hair, dark eyes, real pretty, real slender. ...

  He told one friend: “Boy, she’s filled in all the right spaces!” Bina was teary with joy on the phone. “Lord, what a difference!”

  A month after the dance, Phyllis got the test results for her Army enlistment. She had allergies the Army was concerned about. “Well,” Bob said, “you could prob’ly get out ... if you got married ...” Phyllis didn’t speak. Bob said: “Aghh, think you could live in Russell, Kansas?” She said she thought she could, with Bob.

  She called her mother on April 27th, her birthday, and said she was getting married. “He’s been paralyzed, but he’s had a wonderful return. He’s still got some paralysis in his right arm, but it doesn’t seem to bother him ...” Her mother hit the roof.

  “Phyllis, you can’t have another lame duck!”

  “Oh, Mother!”

  “My God, Phyllis! You said he can’t button a button, zip a zipper! How’s he ever going to earn a living?”

  “He’s going to go to college!”

  “Well,” Estelle Holden insisted, “your father and I think it’s just too soon.”

  Within days, Estelle got a letter from Bob, analyzing his time in courtship with Phyllis. The way he figured, if it had been normal dating, say once or twice a week, it would have worked out to three years!

  Estelle wrote back with her real reservations: “Phyllis is a very precious child to us, and we want the best for her. And unless you are capable of becoming a husband to her, in all ways, we don’t think it would be a good idea.”

  That was hard for Bob to take. But Phyllis wouldn’t let him get down about it. “Bob, it’s just because they haven’t met you.”

  She told her mother: Make the announcement! And she and Bob started driving east, to New Hampshire.

  Two weeks later, Bina and Doran arrived, and Bob and Phyllis were married, June 12, 1948.

  In June, after the College World Series and Graduation Day in New Haven, Poppy packed up his new red Studebaker (a graduation gift from Pres), and started driving south. Bar and Georgie went up to Walker’s Point, to wait for Pop to find them a home. It was just a few days before they got the letter with the good news: Poppy was a star! Of course, all his Yale training was wrong, but he was getting better with a broom, and the boss said he was the best warehouse sweeper that Ideco’s Odessa Branch Office ever had.

  And he’d found them a house—well, half a house. (He wrote that it was “kind of humble.”) So Bar and Georgie got an airplane to Dallas and then to the Midland-Odessa field, a propeller-flight journey of more than twelve hours, to join George in their strange new world ... and my, wasn’t it exotic!

  First, it was flat, perfectly flat, like no land they’d ever seen. No brooks, streams, rivers. No native trees—no trees. It was bright, and hot like they’d never felt heat, and gritty everywhere with dust. The blacktop into town from the airport shimmered between opposing ranks of strange, hulking drill rigs, piles of steel pipe, casing, tubing, decking, cable ... all baked in the sun-grit, like ossified armies standing gu
ard on the tatty tin or cinderblock sheds housing the businesses behind. And then, as George and Bar turned onto their street, East Seventh, the pavement gave way altogether, and they rolled on two ruts of dust to a stop, in front of their new home.

  It was a shotgun house—tiny in the first place, but now partitioned down the middle, so two families could each have a narrow, half-living room, just inside the concrete front step, and then a counter giving on to a tiny kitchen, and one narrow bedroom in the rear. The partition ended at the back, with the bathroom, which both tenants shared. It was one of the few bathrooms on the street. Most had an outhouse in the boxy backyard, like Mr. Wagley, two doors down, whose outhouse shared his rear plot of dust with the junk he collected for a living, and his wagon, and his horse. The immediate neighbors, in the other half of the shotgun house, were a mother and her daughter (and the daughter’s toddler daughter), who made their living entertaining male guests, which pretty much tied up the bathroom, from sundown on.

  It was all so ... interesting! You just didn’t see stuff like that in Rye, or Greenwich—even New Haven. In fact, back in Rye, Pauline Pierce thought poor Barbara must be desperate: Odessa! It smacked of Russia and want. She kept sending cold cream, and boxes of soap flakes, convinced that privation dogged her daughter at that edge of the earth. But there was no privation, no desperation. In fact, it was only thirty-five years later, when George Bush had to convince the world that he wasn’t some timid toy poodle, that it ever came to be described as a roll of the dice, a gamble. ... At the time, it was just a wonderful adventure! See, it wasn’t really their world. George and Bar always knew that—they weren’t trapped. They could always go back ... or go somewhere else. They were in it, and yet, not quite of it, immune to enjoy it like expatriates who talk with fascination about “the locals” and their strange folkways.

  Such fun: high school football on Friday nights, with a crowd twice as big as Yale ever drew, all in their shirtsleeves, fanning themselves in the twilight heat, and girl cheerleaders! Never saw that back East! ... And barbecues over a fire in an oil drum, and grits, and chili, and chicken-fried steak at Agnes’ Café. Oh, we love that stuff! ... And the strange and humorous things that George would report when he came home, about the squinty stares he drew at the oil field, or out painting pumps, with the good ol’ bubbas in the heat and the grit ...