The Family

by Kitty Kelley

  Barbara didn’t doubt him for a minute, and she soon shared her confidence with the rest of the family. “I remember when we were sitting in Nancy Walker’s house in Kennebunkport,” recalled Mary Carter Walker. “There were about five ladies and they said, ‘How would you ever like to be First Lady?’ And we went around . . . And then we came to Barbara and she said, ‘I’d like it, because, you know, I’m going to be First Lady sometime.’”

  She had to start at the bottom of the political ladder. A few years after her last child was born, her husband announced that he was going to run for chairman of the Republican Party of Harris County. Given the number of Republicans in Houston who did not belong to the John Birch Society at the time, George Bush might just as well have announced that he was going to shoot polar bear in the Gulf of Mexico.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Texans say the difference between Midland and Houston is the difference between no riches and nouveaux riches. Midland is where you go to strike oil, and Houston is where you go after the first gusher. In Midland, the Bushes were Presbyterians. In Houston, they became Episcopalians, considered by some a step up the liturgical ladder. Moving from Midland to Houston also meant a brand-new house with seven bedrooms, a third-floor sauna, an exercise room, a swimming pool, and a long driveway, plus live-in help for Barbara and private schooling (the Kinkaid School) for Georgie, which put him on the fast track to Andover. For big George, the move meant a bigger political playground—meaner and muddier.

  By 1959, Houston, like Dallas, had become a hotbed of extremism. The nation’s sixth-largest city had become a stronghold of the John Birch Society, a rabid anti-Communist right-wing organization founded by Robert Welch and bankrolled by the Texas oil billionaire H. L. Hunt, who sponsored the vitriolic radio program Lifeline that aired in forty-two states. Over the next ten years, the John Birch objectives were to abolish the graduated income tax, repeal Social Security, end busing for the purpose of school integration, dissolve U.S. membership in the United Nations, and nullify the treaty that gave the Panama Canal to Panama.

  The Birchers publicly castigated President Eisenhower, CIA Director Allen Dulles, and Chief Justice Earl Warren as “dedicated conscious agents of the Communist conspiracy.” They contended that the Council on Foreign Relations, for many years led by David Rockefeller, was an elite international cabal that sought to establish world tyranny. In Dallas, Birchers spat on Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and heckled Vice President Lyndon Johnson. In Houston, they tried to take over the Republican Party of Harris County, until GOP locals sent up a flare. The locals wanted someone sensible who could expand the party and still keep it safe for the conservative senator from Arizona, Barry Goldwater, to be the standard-bearer in 1964. George Bush felt he was the right man for the job. “I am a 100 percent Goldwater man,” he said.

  He wrote to his friend and fellow Bonesman Representative Lud Ashley, an Adlai Stevenson Democrat from Ohio, that he was running for the unexpired term (one year) of chairman of the Harris County GOP.

  “I think I’ll win,” he wrote. His friend would come to realize that George was never paralyzed by the difference between certitude and certainty. “I’m not used to losing,” Bush told reporters in 1964.

  George was so unknown in Houston then that the newspaper ran someone else’s picture over his name when he announced his candidacy. George called the editor to complain and sent him a personal photograph, which the paper published after he won an overwhelming victory—by default. He became the Republican chairman of Harris County in 1962 when his opponent Russell Pryor withdrew. As county chairman, he immediately launched an aggressive lawsuit to force legislative reapportionment in Texas to get a winnable district for the Republicans.

  For the first time since Reconstruction, the Texas GOP felt emboldened to make such a demand and challenge Democratic dominance. The historic comeback of the Texas Republican Party had begun in the fall of 1960, when the people of the state were given the chance—legitimately—to vote twice in the same election for Lyndon Johnson, who appeared on the ballot both as John F. Kennedy’s running mate and, for added insurance, as a candidate for reelection to the U.S. Senate. This maddened Republicans. Dorothy Bush, who was campaigning vigorously in Greenwich for Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge, fumed that “Senator Johnson is the forgotten man . . . so unsure of the election he had a special law passed so he could run for senator again as well as vice president just in case he should lose.”

  LBJ won his Senate seat by defeating John G. Tower, a pint-size professor of political science from Southern Methodist University. Johnson also won the vice presidency and carried the state for Kennedy. When LBJ resigned from the Senate, Tower jumped back in the race. This was the only good news to come out of the 1960 election as far as Prescott Bush was concerned. As he wrote to Tower: “I am . . . delighted to hear that you are once more in the race. I can think of nothing more beneficial to Texas than your victory. I have a strong feeling that you will make an excellent United States Senator. I admire your courage and your whole approach to politics.”

  In the special election required by Texas law, Tower won the LBJ seat and became the first Republican since Reconstruction sent to the Senate from a southern state. His election marked an epic turn in Texas politics that would lead to Republican supremacy within forty years.

  The one big city that Richard Nixon carried in 1960 was Houston, a fact not lost on the ambitious new chairman of the Harris County GOP. Within three months of his election to his minor post, George Bush started talking about becoming the next Republican senator from Texas. He felt he was the best man to take on the venerable Ralph Yarborough, whom George considered “far too liberal.”

  George was encouraged in this fantasy by his family and friends, who believed, as he did, that anyone who met him would vote for him. “If you can get enough exposure,” Lud Ashley wrote, “if enough people get to know you personally or via television—you’ll get elected.”

  Almost forty, George had reached peak handsomeness, a fact frequently mentioned in the state’s small-town newspapers. “He could very well be cast into a movie role of his true life story,” said the Austin American-Statesman. “He looks like a U.S. Senator,” said The Kingsville Record. “The candidate is a handsome man, handsome in a way that appeals to men as well as women,” said the Refugio County Press.

  In addition to his good looks, George was blessed with indefatigable energy, inexhaustible financial resources, and an efficient campaign organization. “He is by all odds the classiest Republican ever to flash on the Texas scene,” wrote the political columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak.

  After George conferred with his father and friends, he decided in 1962 to announce a run for the Senate the next year. He was convinced he would win in 1964 on the coattails of Barry Goldwater, whom he admired as much as his father had admired Eisenhower. “Goldwater is the best chance we have,” George said. He gave a copy of Goldwater’s manifesto, The Conscience of a Conservative, to his son Georgie, a student at Andover.

  Georgie’s roommate, John Kidde, was surprised to see the book lying on Bush’s desk. “What the hell is this?” he said. “We didn’t have any time to read anything extracurricular. If we did, you would read a novel. But George seemed honestly interested in the book. He said his parents had asked him to read it. I remember him telling me what Goldwater stood for.”

  At the time George Herbert Walker Bush decided to run for the Senate, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who had divorced his wife in 1961, was the leading GOP contender for President. He was far ahead of everyone else in the polls, including Goldwater, until May 4, 1963, when the governor announced that he was going to remarry. The press then reported that he had been having an affair with his new wife, Margaretta Fitler “Happy” Murphy, when both were married to others. She gave up custody of her four children to marry Rockefeller, and the scandal whip-lashed the country.

  The Hudson River Presbytery im
mediately censured the prelate who had married Governor Rockefeller and Mrs. Murphy as a “disturber of the peace,” and in Chicago the Young Adults for Rockefeller for President quickly disbanded. The following month Prescott Bush, who had previously supported Rockefeller for national office and urged Nixon to pick him as his running mate in 1960 over Henry Cabot Lodge, now assailed the governor in a speech to the graduating class of Rosemary Hall, an all-girls high school in Greenwich and the sister school of Choate.

  “Have we come to the point in our life as a nation when the governor of a great state—one who perhaps aspires to be nominated for President of the United States—can desert a good wife, divorce her, then persuade a young mother of four youngsters to abandon her husband and their four children and marry the governor?

  “Have we come to the point where one of the two great political parties will confer upon such a one its highest honor and greatest responsibility? I venture to hope not.

  “What would Abraham Lincoln think of such a chain of events? Have our standards shifted so much that the American people will approve such a chain of events? I venture to hope not.”

  Prescott said that whether Rockefeller’s actions were appropriate would depend on educators, opinion makers, and religious leaders. Then he added: “It will depend on whether our people are ready to say ‘phooey’ to the sanctity of the American home and the American family.

  “Are we ready to say goodbye to the solemn pledge ‘to have and to hold until death do us part’? Young ladies, I hope not, for your sake.”

  The next day Prescott elaborated on his fulmination by telling reporters that Rockefeller should “publicly withdraw” from presidential contention. “The Governor’s actions are a matter of great disappointment, for I have always been for Mr. Rockefeller, and consider him a very able, versatile man, one I have always respected and held in high esteem. But we can’t overlook this chain of events and I think people should speak out honestly on the question.”

  Prescott stopped short of endorsing Barry Goldwater to help his son’s campaign in Texas, but the political impact of his blast was not lost on the Republican National Committee’s George Hinman, a close political associate of Rockefeller’s. Hinman knew that George Bush could not survive politically in Texas if his father, already perceived by conservatives as far too liberal, had supported Rockefeller in any way. In this instance, Prescott was able to combine a little politics with a lot of outrage over divorce. Hinman was not convinced.

  “I always have some question about people who pass harsh moral judgments on other people’s lives and situations they know nothing about,” said Hinman. “In former Senator Bush’s case it’s clear that the motivation is a good deal more political than moral. It’s too bad the young ladies before whom he defamed the Governor could not have been aware of the political motivation behind this intemperate attack.”

  Prescott said he had been inundated with telegrams and letters showing “overwhelming approval” of his criticism. George, too, received letters commending his father, including one from Rockefeller’s foe William F. Buckley Jr., editor in chief of National Review: “I wrote your father, by the way, to congratulate him on his courage in making the statement about Governor Rockefeller . . . I hope he hasn’t suffered from it.”

  Several months later Texas newspapers would report that Prescott Bush, former U.S. senator from Connecticut and father of the GOP candidate for Senate, had been named as a defense adviser to Barry Goldwater’s Peace Through Preparedness Committee.

  Prescott might not have been so censorious about Governor Rockefeller’s marriage and divorce had he known what a New York attorney says he knew about Prescott’s son George’s extramarital dalliances.

  According to the attorney, at the time Prescott was preaching Bush family values to New York’s governor, George Bush was having an affair with an Italian beauty named Rosemarie [last name deleted for privacy reasons], whom he had met on one of his numerous business trips. Rosemarie told the attorney that the couple shared an apartment in New York City and that George promised to get a divorce and marry her. He changed his mind in the fall of 1964 and broke off the relationship, but he agreed to pay the last three months of the year lease on their apartment. Rosemarie sought legal counsel, thinking she might have recourse for breach of promise.

  “According to my records, she came to see me at 11 a.m. on September 21, 1964, at our law firm in the Chrysler Building,” recalled the attorney, then a junior partner with Upham and Meeker. “She was quite upset, very emotional . . . I’d never heard of George Bush at that time, but being a New Yorker I certainly knew who his father, Prescott Bush, was.

  “As I recall, Rosemarie said she was from a noble Italian family—Rome, I think—and that she would never have entered into an adulterous relationship if George had not promised to leave his wife and marry her. She said she could not return home because of the shame. She was very emotional . . . I got the impression that she and Bush not only lived together in Manhattan when he was here but that he squired her around to social events and they were very much a couple in public around the city. She told me he even put his name on the apartment directory which made her think she might have grounds for a common law marriage . . . You’ve got to remember that this was in 1964 when only the most affluent people were flying. Planes were luxury travel then . . . So it would’ve been fairly easy for George Bush to have lived two lives then—one as a married man in Houston and quite another one in New York City . . . He was not the only married businessman to have such an arrangement.

  The attorney was impressed by the lovely Rosemarie and believed her story. “I still remember Rosemarie’s dark hair and dark eyes,” he said many years later. “She was extremely attractive, lively and volatile. She had met one of the senior partners of my law firm at a party and in a weak moment when she said she needed a lawyer, he suggested she consult with me. Even if we had handled that kind of work, which we didn’t, she did not have a legal case and I had to tell her so . . . I felt bad because she was so emotionally distraught . . . I never saw her again.”

  According to plan, George announced his candidacy for the Senate in September 1963, and by the end of the next month he and his family had begun to feel confident about his impending success. His father wrote to his good friend Samuel Bemiss in Richmond, Virginia: “Poppy looks to be fairly sure of the Republican nomination in Texas and Senator Tower told me . . . he thought he would win the election.”

  Cheered by Prescott’s news, Bemiss, a conservative southern Democrat who met the Bushes while summering at Kennebunkport, sent a campaign contribution to George and mentioned his son Gerry’s campaign for the Virginia Senate: “The important issues seem . . . the poll tax and hatred of the Kennedys. We want to retain the poll tax [to keep poor blacks from registering to vote] but would be glad to see the Kennedys go back to Ireland.”

  George took a similar stand in his own campaign. He ran hard against civil rights during a time when antiblack violence had inflamed passions throughout the South and the North. In June 1963, President Kennedy addressed the nation in a heartfelt appeal on behalf of civil rights as a moral cause. In one of the best speeches of his life, the President called upon the country to honor its finest traditions:

  We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities . . . One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free . . . Now the time has come for this Nation to fulfill its promise . . . the fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South, where legal remedies are not at hand . . . A great change is at hand,
and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all . . . Next week I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.

  The day after the President’s speech Medgar Evers, a black activist from Mississippi and a World War II veteran of the D-day invasion, was assassinated by a rifle shot in the back as he walked toward his wife and children.

  Against that tragic background, on June 19, 1963, the President sent to Congress the most far-reaching civil rights bill in the country’s history. To demonstrate a mandate for the legislation, Martin Luther King Jr. led 250,000 people to Washington, D.C., that summer. He stood at the feet of Abraham Lincoln at the memorial of the Great Emancipator and filled the air with the incandescent rhetoric of his “I Have a Dream” speech.

  “As television beamed the image of this extraordinary gathering across the border oceans,” King later recalled, “everyone who believed in man’s capacity to better himself had a moment of inspiration and confidence in the future of the human race.”

  Campaigning in Texas, George Bush ignored Martin Luther King Jr. and vigorously opposed President Kennedy and his civil rights bill at every turn.

  “I am against the Civil Rights bill on the grounds that it transcends civil rights and violates the constitutional rights of all the people,” Bush said. “Job opportunity, education and fair play will help alleviate inequities. Sweeping federal legislation will fail.

  “I am opposed to the public accommodation section. I still favor the problem being handled by moral persuasion at the local level.”

  Determined to campaign in each of Texas’s 247 counties, George inveighed against the civil rights bill at every stop. He also charged that “a liberal left-wing radical like Ralph Yarborough,” the state’s senior senator, would be the first in line to vote for it.