by Kitty Kelley
During that summer, young George worked in his father’s campaign, looking up phone numbers, delivering signs, and compiling briefing books on all the counties in Texas. Before he left for college in September, he drove the Bush Bandwagon Bus for a whistle-stop tour of fifty cities, including the tiny towns of Paris, Honey Grove, Bells, Electra, Henrietta, Quanah, Tahoka, Dimmitt, Big Spring, Snyder, Floydada, O’Donnell, Lamesa, Odessa, and Midland.
At every stop, young George jumped off the bus with his parents and scooted around town to draw a crowd for his father.
“I remember him well,” said Don Dangerfield, a retired fireman in Odessa, then an activist against racial segregation. “That boy knew he was going places, touring the white side of town like there was never going to be any doubt about it, just because of who he was.”
Big George spoke on courthouse squares, in parks, at receptions, barbecues, ice-cream socials, picnics, livestock auctions, factory workers’ lunch hours, and “come to Jesus” meetings. The Bush Bluebonnets, a group of pretty young women who wore big blue hats while they distributed Bush buttons and brochures, and the Black Mountain Boys, whom George introduced at every stop as “four Church of Christ lads from Abilene,” accompanied George and Barbara on the bus trip. The “lads,” an old-fashioned term George had picked up from his father, sang their cowboy rendition of “The sun’s gonna shine in the Senate some day, George Bush is gonna chase them liberals away.” Huge, happy, clapping, stomping crowds at every stop convinced the Bushes of certain victory.
Barry Goldwater made two appearances in the state with George, as did Richard Nixon, again to stupendous crowds. Particularly buoyed by Nixon’s visit, George wrote to thank him:
It helped immeasurably. You really got under Ralph’s skin and he kept going around after this visit saying, “I really am effective” and “my colleagues really do like me.” In fact, he ran in a few left-wing colleagues to prove his point. Your visit was great and all of us here appreciate it. It was a terrific help in fund raising.
“We’re going to win,” George told his supporters in the middle of October. “I can feel it. I can just feel it.” Yarborough had slipped so far in the polls that The Houston Chronicle headlined the front page with the news: “Yarborough, Bush Even.” Newsweek predicted victory: “Insiders like Bush in a squeaker.” Even the Yale Daily News weighed in: “George Bush is young, energetic, and very conservative, and a victory over liberal incumbent Ralph Yarborough would make him a power in the GOP. And a victory is quite likely.” The Democrats in Harris County were so worried they fired off a telegram to the President in the White House:
IN VIEW OF THE UNBELIEVABLE NUMBER OF DEMOCRATS WHO ARE CONSIDERING VOTING FOR GEORGE BUSH WE CONSIDER IT IMPERATIVE THAT YOU MAKE AN APPEARANCE IN HOUSTON BETWEEN NOW AND ELECTION DAY TO SUPPORT THE CANDIDACY OF OUR GOOD DEMOCRATIC SENATOR RALPH YARBOROUGH
The President flew to Texas to campaign for Yarborough, but by Election Day the Bush team had become so certain of victory that they changed their party site from the campaign headquarters to the largest hotel ballroom in Houston simply to accommodate the crush of well-wishers who wanted to celebrate George’s win. Prescott and Dorothy flew in from Connecticut with their son Jonathan. Young George flew home from his freshman year at Yale to be with his family for the grand occasion. The ballroom of the Hotel America had been stuffed with balloons for the celebration.
“At 7:01 p.m. as we were pulling into the parking lot of the hotel for our victory party, the radio announcer cancelled it,” recalled young George. “‘In the race for U.S. Senate in Texas, Senator Ralph Yarborough has defeated George Bush.’”
Dejectedly, young George assumed the job of posting the election returns for the growing crowds. By 9:00 p.m., it was painfully obvious to everyone that President Johnson had won the greatest landslide victory in thirty years of American politics. He swept forty-four states and the District of Columbia, practically drowning Goldwater, who conceded before midnight. The Johnson tidal wave also swept Ralph Yarborough into office with 1,463,958 votes to 1,134,337 votes for George Bush.
Standing in the hotel ballroom, George was thunderstruck by his loss. He circled the room, shaking hands and thanking volunteers for their hard work. He smiled gamely and tried to hold back his tears as he conceded defeat and congratulated his opponent. “He beat me fair and square,” he said, his voice trembling. “I have been trying to think whom we could blame for this and regretfully conclude that the only one I can blame is myself.” Toward the end of the evening, campaign workers spotted young George W. in tears.
Later his stunned father met with reporters. “I just don’t know how it happened,” said George. “I don’t understand it. I guess I have a lot to learn about politics . . . The straight party lever hurt me and with a Texan on the ballot that hurt me. I understand we were beaten very badly in minority precincts but . . .”
Yarborough was jubilant, especially when President Johnson dropped by his headquarters to offer congratulations. The President addressed campaign workers: “Thank you for not handicapping us for another six years with another Republican senator.”
The senator later described the campaign as “one of the vilest in history.” He said he knew his vote for the civil rights bill might have cost him votes. “I knew that only 38 percent of the people of Texas approved it and that was risky. I voted for the long-range best interest of Texas. I wouldn’t be true to myself if I didn’t.” He received 98.5 percent of the state’s black vote in 1964, the first year there was no poll tax—which greatly hindered poor voters, that is black voters, from voting—in federal elections in Texas. He then tore in to his opponent and said George Bush “ought to pack up his baggage and go back where he came from.”
At that point, The Houston Post, which had made no endorsement in the race, suddenly made up its mind. In an editorial titled “Snide Statement,” the paper wrote:
We found it difficult to decide before the election whether Sen. Ralph Yarborough or Houston’s George Bush would make the better senator. However, Yarborough made it easy for us—and others—to decide who looked better after the election.
The bigger man is George Bush, who took a bitter defeat gracefully. Bush, in his concession speech, said he had nobody to blame but himself. “He [Yarborough] beat me fair and square and I wish him success,” Bush said.
And Yarborough, the big winner? He issued a snide statement to the effect that Bush ought to pack his bags and leave the state. We’d like to point out to Ralph that Texas needs more men like George Bush, regardless of affiliation.
Yarborough won bigger than many thought he would. But he comes out of it a smaller man than his opponent. And he lost something that should be important, even to a politician—respect.
Samuel Bemiss, who like George opposed the Civil Rights Act, sent condolences to “My dear Pres” on November 4, 1964:
Poppy reflected honour and credit on his family and friends. . . .
He has lost nothing and gained much.
Prescott responded to “Dear Sambo”: “It was just too much, the updraft of the LBJ vote and the down pull of the Goldwater Miller team. Our lad was hurt by both altho he polled more votes than any Rep. ever polled in Texas, including Ike.”
George’s father, at age sixty-nine, was struggling to adjust to his own precipitous political retirement. He also wrote to Bemiss: “I miss the Senate. I can’t get over it. There was a full life.”
Prescott never adjusted. Writing to his Yale classmates for their fiftieth reunion, he admitted how much he continued to miss the Senate:
I miss its excitement, its pressures and its privileges, particularly the privilege of service to my party and to the people of the State I have come to love. But . . . I believe I am [finally] getting more philosophical about my dilemma. Life has been too good to me to permit fretfulness in the closing years. After all, I have always believed in retirement at 65 or 68, so I really should never complain about a decision, which was my own, as I approac
hed 68.
Shortly after leaving the Senate, Prescott was unceremoniously dropped from the Social Register.
George, meanwhile, was devastated by his own loss. “The only time I remember his being very, very down was when he was beaten for the [Senate],” said Mary Carter Walker. “When he came . . . to visit us, I never saw anyone as depressed as he was. But he got over it after a few days. Got out on the golf course and got over it.”
Actually, it took George much longer to recover from his staggering defeat than his Aunt Mary realized. When he finally limped back into his office, he started writing letters to his supporters. He promised Richard Nixon he would stay active in the party, admitting that it was “hard to concentrate [on business] after the intensity of the Senate campaign.” He thanked President Eisenhower for his endorsement and apologized for losing. “I think the greatest thing ever to happen to my father, in a very eventful life, was his service in the United States Senate. Perhaps it was overly ambitious of me to think that I might be there, too.”
Seven months after the 1964 Senate race, George was still smarting over his loss when he wrote to Lud Ashley: “I’ve recovered, well almost, from Nov.”
Young George had returned to Yale, where 70 percent of the campus had supported Lyndon Johnson. The Yale Daily News reported that of the twenty-two alumni running for public office, all but four had won; the four losers, Republicans all, included George Herbert Walker Bush, who “was expected to present a stiff challenge to Yarborough, but was trounced in Johnson’s two-to-one landslide.”
Young George did not mention his father’s defeat to any of his four roommates. One of them, Clay Johnson, kept looking for signs of despondency, but said he saw none.
Years later George W. would claim that after the election, he ran into the Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin on campus and introduced himself. Coffin, according to George, said, “Oh, yes. I know your father. Frankly, he was beaten by a better man.” George claimed that this incident engendered his lifelong distrust of easterners and began to shape his political thinking. “What angered me was the way such people at Yale felt so intellectually superior and so righteous. They thought they had all the answers. They thought they could create a government that could solve all our problems for us.”
The first time George mentioned the incident with Coffin to anyone was when he was being interviewed by Texas Monthly in 1994, thirty years after it had allegedly occurred. Running for governor of Texas, George may have felt he needed to country-boy his Ivy League credentials. His story was repeated by The Washington Post in 1999, which carried a denial from Coffin that was heavily offset by a quote from Barbara Bush: “You talk about a shattering blow. Not only to George, but shattering to us. And it was a very awful thing for a chaplain to say to a freshman at college, particularly if he might have wanted to have seen him in church. I’m not sure that George W. ever put his foot again [in the school chapel].”
Yet Barbara Bush, known for holding grudges, did not mention this “shattering blow” in her memoir. Nor did George himself deem the life-changing event worth mentioning in his autobiography. Both omissions tend to cast some doubt on the credibility of the story.
“I don’t recall any conversation with George W. Bush at Yale, and I certainly don’t remember my saying anything so cruel, even in jest,” said William Sloane Coffin many years later. By then George’s story had been printed in The Hartford Courant and The New York Times. “After so many people mentioned the story George was telling, I wrote to him and said I had a hard time imagining my saying with utmost seriousness that his father had been beaten by a better man. But if George was telling the story, I had to believe him, and so I asked him to forgive what neither of us understood.”
George scribbled a short note in reply: “I believe my recollection is correct. But I also know time passes, and I bear no ill will.”
To those who know William Sloane Coffin, an avowed human rights activist, the story seems preposterous. To those who know George W. Bush the story seems improbable. Not one of his dorm mates interviewed many years later recalled his mentioning the incident at the time it supposedly occurred. Yet no one wanted to publicly challenge his credibility.
Coffin was a man of immense stature at Yale when he was chaplain. In the forefront of civil rights, he had been arrested in 1961 on the first Freedom Ride in Montgomery, Alabama. A champion of civil disobedience, he also became a national figure in the antiwar movement. Gratuitous cruelty was not part of his character.
“I can maybe—and I stress maybe—see George running into the Rev on campus and feeling that he [Coffin] wasn’t all that sympathetic to George senior’s loss,” said one Yale man in George’s class, “but that’s only because Reverend Coffin was known to be for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam, in total contrast to George’s father, who opposed civil rights and supported the war.”
In the ensuing years, William Sloane Coffin and George Herbert Walker Bush would become ideological foes, and perhaps the younger George, who always picked up the cudgels for his father, allowed his general animosity to form a specific recollection—one that would resonate in the state where he was seeking office.
By the time George W. Bush told his Reverend Coffin story in 1994, he had entered the political arena in which truth was frequently the first casualty. In 1964, such a story about an illustrious liberal chaplain would not have been accepted. Thirty years later, in a more conservative climate, the story might seem almost plausible.
As far as George Herbert Walker Bush had strayed from his father’s political principles, his firstborn son, George Walker Bush, had begun to stray even further.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The lawsuit George lodged as chairman of the Harris County Republican Party rocketed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in 1964 their ruling of “one man, one vote” fell back in his lap like a bowl of rich cream. The ruling required the city of Houston, previously one congressional district, to be divided into three. One of the new districts—the seventh—was predominantly rich, white, and Republican: that was the district George wanted to represent in Congress. A poll he commissioned showed that a Republican could easily win there, so he announced his candidacy for the 1966 congressional race. He said he was “a man who will owe his allegiance and his vote only to his constituents.” Not a difficult position to take, because most of his constituents were just like him.
This time George took no chances. He knew he needed to get elected to public office if he was ever to become President, so he resigned his position at Zapata to devote all his energy to political campaigning. He hired an advertising executive from J. Walter Thompson in New York City to orchestrate his media. He brought Richard Nixon to Houston to launch the campaign, he persuaded House Minority Leader Gerald Ford to raise money, and he sought another endorsement from President Eisenhower.
He wrote to Ike:
There is no incumbent and it is a district that I carried 57% to 42% in the Senate race in 1964. My opponent is a conservative Democrat . . . but I feel I can beat him.
I hate to impose on my Father’s friendship with you once again, but if it would be possible to endorse the enclosed picture as suggested below, I would appreciate it.
George explained that the picture was for “a Negro friend, Mr. Jesse Johnson, who is working for me . . . The Negro vote could be the difference in our race and since I’m running against an ex–district attorney, I feel that we will have an excellent chance to pick up a good percentage of the Negro vote.”
The number of black voters in his district was comparatively small, but it was a voting bloc George wanted. To soften his oft-stated opposition to civil rights, he followed the suggestion of his masseur, an African American named Bobby Moore, and sponsored an all-girls Negro softball team called “the George Bush All Stars.” He wrote in his campaign brochure as a partial explanation for the sponsorship: “Organized athletics is a wonderful answer to juvenile delinquency.”
His opponent, Fra
nk Briscoe, accused him of pandering to black voters, but George deflected the charge. “I think the day is past when we can afford to have a white district,” he said. “I will not attempt to appeal to the white backlash. I am in step with the 60’s.”
Always hyperactive, George swung into overdrive, spinning around the district like a hamster on a wheel. He worked feverishly, out every day at sunrise, going door-to-door, shaking hands, telling people he cared, but as one writer covering that campaign noted, “about what was never made clear.” Still, George was doing exactly what his highly paid Madison Avenue adman, Harry Treleaven, had told him to do: establish a likable public image. In a campaign memo, Treleaven had written: “Bush . . . must be shown as a man who’s working his heart out to win.” As always, what was important to George—and what he assumed was important to everyone else—was image. Substance was of relatively little value, as was any sort of vision, moral code, or core beliefs. What mattered was winning—and being perceived as a winner.
His opponent looked so reactionary that George appeared moderate. Like George, Frank Briscoe opposed any kind of civil rights legislation, but Briscoe also firmly embraced the John Birch Society, which George had finally repudiated. After his first campaign, George said he was ashamed that he had not done so sooner. Segregated public accommodations were still common then in East Texas and not unheard of in Houston. Yet both men opposed government interference that might end such racist restrictions. George claimed that legislation was not necessary to ensure open housing for all. “There are wonderful alternatives in the field of housing that will help all persons attain home ownership,” he said vaguely.
He took out a full-page ad in Forward Times, the black weekly; a photograph showed him with white shirtsleeves rolled up, tie loosened, and his jacket slung over his shoulder—a direct steal from his telegenic Yale contemporary John Lindsay, the mayor of New York City. The message accompanying George’s photo: