by Kitty Kelley
“I think most Texans share my opposition to this legislation,” Bush told five hundred women at the Dallas Country Club, which was restricted to whites only. “And Yarborough’s consistent voting record shows utter disregard for the wishes of his constituents.”
Yarborough, like George’s father, had voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1957. In fact, Prescott had supported the strongest (unpassable) version of the 1957 civil rights bill; he also supported the 1960 Civil Rights Act, and he supported every civil rights amendment offered to any bill in 1961 and 1962—and even put forth several such amendments himself. Yet there is nothing in documents released to date that indicates Prescott’s personal views concerning his son’s lack of commitment to civil rights in 1964 or his campaign tactics. In later years, George’s mother expressed her dismay and disapproval, but in 1964 there is nothing to suggest that his father showed any concern or offered any advice. Whenever Prescott mentions the campaign in a letter, he simply says he is excited about the prospect of George’s winning. When George loses, his father says “the lad” has nothing to be ashamed of.
Prescott was a Republican who presumably could hold his nose and support Republicans of many stripes, his own son included, just as Democrats for years had supported southerners with opposing views. While Prescott attacked southern Democrats in public when civil rights bills rolled around, the rest of the time he managed to maintain strong friendships with Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas and Samuel Bemiss of Virginia, both of whom held racist views.
On November 22, 1963, George and Barbara headed for Tyler, Texas (population thirty-five thousand), where he was scheduled for a luncheon speech to the Kiwanis Club, a group of one hundred men, meeting at the Blackstone Hotel.
“I remember it was a beautiful fall day,” recalled Aubrey Irby, the former Kiwanis vice president. “George had just started to give his speech when Smitty, the head bellhop, tapped me on the shoulder to say that President Kennedy had been shot. I gave the news to the president of the club, Wendell Cherry, and he leaned over to tell George that wires from Dallas confirmed President Kennedy had been assassinated.
“George stopped his speech and told the audience what had happened. ‘In view of the President’s death,’ he said, ‘I consider it inappropriate to continue with a political speech at this time. Thank you very much for your attention.’ Then he sat down.
“I thought that was rather magnanimous of him to say and then to sit down, but I’m a Republican, of course, and I was all for George Bush. Kennedy, who was bigger than life then, represented extremely opposite views from Bush on everything.”
The luncheon meeting adjourned, and George hurried across the street to meet Barbara at the beauty salon for their scheduled flight to Dallas. Before leaving the city, George called the FBI in Houston. Files obtained under the Freedom of Information Act document George’s 1:45 p.m. call to the Houston field office: “Bush stated that he wanted to be kept confidential but wanted to furnish hearsay that he recalled hearing in recent days . . . He stated that one James Milton Parrott has been talking of killing the President when he comes to Houston.”
The man George turned in was an unemployed twenty-four-year-old who had been honorably discharged from the Air Force upon the recommendation of a psychiatrist. He was also a John Bircher who had vigorously opposed George during Bush’s campaign for GOP chairman of Harris County. During his interview with the FBI, Parrott said he was a member of the Texas Young Republicans and had been active in picketing members of the Kennedy administration but that he had not threatened the President’s life.
Years later, when he was running for President, George would claim that he never made the call. Documents were then produced that refreshed his memory. He also claimed that he did not remember where he was the day John F. Kennedy was killed—“somewhere in Texas,” he said. George Bush is possibly the only person on the planet who did not recall his whereabouts on that day, although his wife clearly remembered their being in Tyler. She said that at the time of the assassination she was writing a letter in the beauty salon and that they left shortly after hearing the news. They flew to Dallas en route to Houston, and in Dallas they had to circle Love Field several times while the second presidential plane was taking off to return to Washington, D.C.
“The rumors are flying about that horrid assassin,” Barbara wrote in her letter. “We are hoping that it is not some far right nut, but a ‘commie’ nut. You understand that we know they are both nuts, but just hope that it is not a Texan and not an American at all.”
George and the three other candidates vying for the GOP Senate nomination suspended campaigning for several weeks but resumed after the first of the year.
On January 1, 1964, George issued a campaign biography that trumpeted his military career: “He was shot down in combat, during action which added the Distinguished Flying Cross to his three Air Medals.” Ten years earlier, perhaps with an eye to his political future, George had written to the Navy requesting the three Air Medals on the basis of the number of missions he had flown in the Pacific theater during World War II. The Navy confirmed from records that George had indeed flown the requisite number of missions and awarded him his three Air Medals. Legare Hole, a pilot in George’s unit, explained that Bush’s medal count had been held down during the war by the policy of his outfit’s commanding officer: “I think you got Air Medals for every five strikes you went on . . . our group, and this was the skipper’s decision, I presume, along with the air group commander, didn’t award anything of that nature, it was strictly on the merits of the mission.”
By June 1964, George had won the primary runoff, and in July he went to the GOP convention in San Francisco as a Goldwater delegate. His father also attended the convention as an alternate delegate from Connecticut, secretly leaning toward the moderate William Scranton, governor of Pennsylvania. Afterward Prescott wrote to his friend Sam Bemiss and asked him to come to Kennebunkport: “I want to tell you about our trip to SF for the convention. It was especially interesting, as Pop was there with his Texas delegation and quite it’s [sic] hero because of his recent primary victory. The corps of Texas news men think our George has a good chance to win in Nov. Wouldn’t that be sumpin’?”
When President Johnson signed the civil rights bill into law in July 1964, George continued wrapping himself in the mantle of states’ rights, which was conservative code for no federal intervention on racial matters. “The new civil rights act was passed to protect 14 percent of the people,” George said. “I’m also worried about the other 86 percent.” At every campaign stop he thumped Senator Yarborough for voting for the bill. “There is nothing more challenging to a conservative than to run against this man,” George said. “I am for the great traditions of this state and those of the Senate itself, and it irks my soul to see a man turn his back on his own people.”
“That was a vicious campaign,” recalled Alex Dickie Jr., an aide to Yarborough. “Bush tried to make Ralph look like a nigger lover . . . Bush played that racial card over and over and appealed to the lowest common denominator in people. He did it then and he has never stopped.”
To some people, Bush’s opposition to the civil rights bill put him in league with segregationists. Like them, George said he would “hate to see” the Constitution “trampled on in the process of trying to solve Civil Rights problems.” He said he drew support for his views from the strong showing of the blatantly racist governor of Alabama, George Wallace, in the Democratic primaries. “This indicates to me that there must be general concern from many responsible people over the Civil Rights bill from all over the nation.”
Charles Sargent Caldwell, a Senate aide to Yarborough, felt the political repercussions of his boss’s vote for the legislation. “George Bush attacked us for that vote practically every time he made a speech . . . Bush’s people—he had lots of surrogates, of course—would never make a speech on behalf of the Republican candidates that they didn’t bring up Ralph voting for this Civil
Rights Act.”
By the summer of 1964 George Bush had become convinced that he was going to win. He had collected the endorsements of twenty Texas newspapers, including both Dallas papers, both papers in Fort Worth, and The Houston Chronicle. When he formed a statewide organization of Democrats for Bush, even President Johnson started to worry.
“Now the problem we’ve got is getting Yarborough to beat this attractive young boy, Bush,” the President told the union leader Walter Reuther. “And he [Yarborough] ought to quit fighting with [Governor John] Connally and every Democrat . . . The only ones he ought to cuss is Republicans . . . They’ll wind up having Tower in the Senate and having Bush in the Senate. That’s the way they’re going. Of course, Yarborough is a very weak candidate. Civil rights and union labor and the Negro thing is not the way to get elected in a state that elects Connally by 72 percent . . . He’s handicapped in that state. Now he wouldn’t be handicapped in Michigan or New York, but he’s handicapped in Texas.”
The Democratic Party in Texas was divided into conservatives like the popular Governor John Connally, moderates like President Lyndon Johnson, and liberals like Senator Yarborough, who was a minority in his own party and known to be quarrelsome.
George Bush figured that anyone as disputatious as Yarborough could not possibly win. The boy who had grown up needing to be liked by everyone was now a forty-year-old man who believed his likability was invincible. “Ralph Yarborough is unpopular in the State,” George wrote Lud Ashley, “and even though the President comes from Texas, I think there will be many people who will want to see Yarborough bumped off.”
Tough, seasoned, and twenty years older, the senator dismissed George as a pretty-boy pip-squeak who was bankrolled by rich Texas racists. Although Yarborough’s campaign was disorganized and underfinanced, he hammered away at his opponent as a rich carpetbagger who belonged “to all them fat Houston clubs.” When George was questioned about his memberships in the Bayou Club, the Ramada Club, and the Houston Country Club—all whites-only clubs—he said he had no problem with belonging. “I always believe people should associate with their friends in things like that.” Yarborough jabbed him as a “Connecticut Yankee,” and George shot back: “I’d rather be from Connecticut and for Texas than from Texas and for Walter Reuther.”
George ridiculed Yarborough for voting for medical care for the aged. He compared the bill to a federal program to air-condition ship holds for apes and baboons, dubbing it “medical air for the caged.”
He blasted Yarborough for supporting such “left-wing federal spending programs” as the Rural Electrification Administration. Yarborough scoffed that George “wouldn’t know a cotton boll from a corn shuck” and was “plumb dumb” to level “so un-Texan a blow at the farmers and ranchers of Texas” by suggesting the elimination of the REA.
George derided Yarborough’s support for the War on Poverty with a reference to the “sun tan” project of the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps, which George said had failed miserably, although the CCC had built many parks and kept youths from running the streets jobless during the height of the Depression.
“Bush wanted to keep the jam up top,” said Alex Dickie Jr., “whereas Yarborough wanted to put the jam on the bottom shelf for the little people.” The senator supported federal aid to education, medical care for the aged, social justice, rights of working men and women, conservation, farm supports, rural electrification, and community development, all of which George opposed.
Having twisted to the far right of his father, George, as head of the Harris County GOP, had portrayed himself as a conservative who could get along with John Birchers on an individual basis. He said that the Republican Party should not be a refuge for segregationists, and yet his effort to bring Negroes into the party was to start a separate GOP organization for them. His good friend Lud Ashley, a Democrat, wrote to him in 1964: “You’re so much better than Goldwater, Tower and that wing of the party, both ideologically and as an intelligent human being that there’s just no contest.”
Despite Ashley’s personal endorsement, there is nothing to show that George Bush was better than what he was espousing. Winning was everything to him. “I like to win,” he told the Associated Press. “Like to succeed. I feel goaded on by competition.”
He later expressed regret at running so far to the right in 1964, yet he ran against civil rights again in 1966 in his first congressional race, and when he did vote for open housing in 1968, he seemed to do so in spite of himself—because black GIs expected it, not because it was the right thing to do. Having supported two Eisenhower campaigns (1952 and 1956) and Nixon’s effort in 1960, George clearly planned to stay a Republican, but during 1964 he did not advertise the fact.
Yarborough taunted him for launching a $2 million campaign and littering the landscape with billboards of himself that barely mentioned the word “Republican.” George countered with allegations that the senator had accepted fifty thousand dollars in a brown paper bag from the Texas fertilizer king Billie Sol Estes, who was in prison for mail fraud and conspiracy.
At rallies Yarborough read from Bush’s campaign material showing that Zapata Offshore drilled for oil in Kuwait, the Persian Gulf, Borneo, and Trinidad. “Every producing oil well drilled in foreign countries by American companies means more cheap foreign oil in American ports, fewer acres of Texas land under oil and gas lease, less income to Texas farmers and ranchers,” said Yarborough. “The issue is clear-cut in this campaign—a Democratic senator who is fighting for the life of the free enterprise system as exemplified by the independent oil and gas producers in Texas, and a Republican candidate who is the contractual driller for the international oil cartel.”
In the oil fields of East Texas, “Smilin’ Raff,” as Yarborough was known, asked crowds if they were ready to vote “for a carpetbagger from Connecticut who is drilling oil for the Sheikh of Kuwait.”
Slipping in the polls every week, Yarborough kept on slugging. “Let’s show the world that old Senator Bush can’t send Little Georgie down here to buy a Senate seat,” he told his supporters. He zinged the pretty boy’s “big ole Daddy” as “out to buy hisself a seat in the United States Senate” so many times that Prescott Bush finally responded with a letter: “George Bush’s Daddy did not send him to Texas. He chose to go 16 years ago and we have been very proud and happy that Texans have taken him to their hearts.”
From afar Prescott enjoyed the rough-and-tumble of his son’s campaign and did whatever he could to help him. But the father’s style was as different from the son’s as were their politics. Somehow Prescott had managed to transcend the limits of his conservative background when he ran for office, whereas George seemed to have regressed. His 1964 campaign was opposed to everything his father represented: civil rights, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, open housing, Medicare. George called Medicare “socialized medicine” and Martin Luther King Jr. “a militant.”
“George Bush is certainly not his father’s image in my view,” said Charles Sargent Caldwell, a staff assistant of Yarborough from 1957 to 1970. “I can recall Prescott Bush being in the Senate of the United States. He was there when I was there, and I recall him as among that vanishing breed of progressive-minded Republicans . . . George Bush . . . is much more conservative. He was affected by his move to Texas . . . There was no doubt about the fact that if you were going to enter the GOP and become active in it in a place like Odessa or Midland, you were dealing with a bunch of folks who were really very, very conservative . . . you could be considered a moderate in Midland, Texas, and you would still be to the right of virtually anybody running for office in Massachusetts . . . That’s just the kind of country [it] was.”
In Texas, George had landed on a planet that could not support life as a progressive Republican. So he acclimated himself (some say too easily) to the conservative redneck terrain. At the time Senator Goldwater advocated using “small tactical nuclear weapons” to defoliate the jungles in South Vietnam, George also proclaimed
his support for restricted use of nuclear weapons, if “militarily prudent.” He then bashed Yarborough for supporting the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
“Lawd almighty,” exclaimed Yarborough. “Bush doesn’t believe in clean air, doesn’t believe in keeping out all the strontium 90 and all the chemicals that pollute the atmosphere, that create cancer in babies, create leukemia, make sterile men and women.”
Immediately George’s finance manager, Martin Allday, suggested he counterpunch with the story of Robin’s leukemia. “I said, ‘George, you can turn this to your advantage.’” But George, according to Allday, said the family tragedy was out of bounds.
Perhaps this rare example of restraint accounted for George’s assessment of himself during that campaign. In his 1987 autobiography, Looking Forward, he wrote: “Just as people listening to a candidate running his first race learn something about the candidate, the candidate learns something about himself. I found out that jugular politics—going for the opposition’s throat—wasn’t my style.”
By then he had obviously forgotten his conversation a few weeks after the 1964 campaign with John Stevens, his Episcopal minister in Houston. Stevens recalled George’s saying, “You know, John, I took some of the far right positions to get elected. I hope I never do it again. I regret it.”
Yet jugular politics would be repeated so often in future campaigns that it became a pattern. George would always repent after caving in to his baser instincts, or what Yarborough called his “meanness to little people.” George’s need to win was so great that he would do whatever was necessary to get elected while at the same time hiding behind a carefully crafted image of niceness. Throughout the 1964 campaign he distributed pictures of himself surrounded by his wife, his dog, and all of his children. He used his son Georgie, eighteen, to tape a thirty-second TV spot in Spanish to appeal to Mexican Americans in the Rio Grande.