by Kitty Kelley
Vote for the Man Who Really Cares About the Things That Are Worrying You These Days. Elect GEORGE BUSH to Congress and Watch the Action.
His slick television ads, his substantial financial backing, plus his name recognition from the 1964 Senate race gave him a resounding (58 percent to 42 percent) victory in November 1966. George Bush had won his first election. But in the end, his appeal to the black community did not work. He did not carry the black vote in his district, something he did not understand. “It was both puzzling and frustrating,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Running for Congress, I talked about the possibility of [breaking the Democratic Party’s grip on black voters] with a longtime friend . . . who chaired the United Negro College Fund when I headed the UNCF drive on the Yale campus in 1948.”
This recollection is typical of George H.W. Bush. Not only does it show the way he rewrites history to fit his convenient view, but it also allows him to find it “puzzling and frustrating” that a Republican who opposed open housing would not find support from black voters. The fact is that George had never “headed” a United Negro College Fund drive at Yale. There was no United Negro College Fund on the campus in 1948. Rather, he worked on the school’s annual budget drive, a charity project that allotted 18 percent of the drive’s twenty-five-thousand-dollar goal to the United Negro College Fund, a far remove from directly raising money for private black colleges. The national office of the United Negro College Fund said its archives show no record of George Herbert Walker Bush being affiliated with them at any time during his entire Yale career.
“Uh . . . maybe he got himself confused with his younger brother Johnny,” joked a friend. “Johnny is a member of the Executive Committee of the United Negro College Fund and a former board chairman. Or his father, Prescott, who worked to raise funds for private Negro colleges back in 1952 when he was state chairman of the United Negro College Fund in Connecticut.”
In later years of campaigning and public life, when George needed to embrace civil rights, he would cite his volunteer work at Yale. He further exaggerated his dubious claim on behalf of the United Negro College Fund so many times that it did not just become real to historians and biographers; it became real to George. When he was asked in 1988 how he could in good conscience portray himself as a candidate for black Americans when the Reagan administration had watered down civil rights for eight years, he sat silently and never objected. Maureen Dowd wrote in The New York Times that he looked genuinely hurt by the question. “But,” George said, “I helped found the Yale chapter of the United Negro College Fund.”
George’s 1966 victory meant yet another move for the Bushes because, unlike some congressional wives, Barbara did not want to stay in their home district while her husband went to Washington, D.C. She knew this congressional seat was the first step toward what George really wanted, and she fully intended to go along for the ride. Young George W. was still attending Yale at this time, so the move did not affect him, but fourteen-year-old Jeb wanted to remain in Houston with his friends and finish ninth grade. (Jeb was relatively used to being parentless. He had spent the first nine months of his life with neighbors while his mother lived in New York City attending to his dying sister. In the ensuing years his father was mostly a fleeting presence. If George wasn’t traveling on business, he was campaigning. “Even when we were growing up in Houston,” Jeb admitted later, “Dad wasn’t home at night to play catch. Mom was always the one to hand out the goodies and the discipline. In a sense, it was a matriarchal family . . . He was hardly around.”)
Barbara asked the Houston oil attorney Baine Kerr whether Jeb could live with the Kerrs during the year. Farming him out to friends was better than her staying in Texas, separated from her husband, whom she rarely saw. When the Kerrs agreed, Barbara and Jeb were both ecstatic.
The Bushes bought a house in Spring Valley, a restricted residential area within the district with real-estate covenants that forbade sales to blacks and Jews. Still, the move to Washington did not promote the family togetherness that Barbara had envisioned. “George went home [to Houston] every week that first term [1967–69],” she recalled. “But the children and I could go only during school vacations.”
Eleven-year-old Neil had been diagnosed with dyslexia in the second grade, and Barbara knew he needed special education. She decided to enroll him and his younger brother, Marvin, in St. Albans, the exclusive Episcopal boys’ school in Washington, D.C. Her daughter, Doro, or Dordie, as she was sometimes called, went to National Cathedral, the companion school for girls.
“I worked for GB that first term,” said Virginia Stanley “Ginny” Douglas. “Everyone in the congressional office called him GB. We were a great big family . . . He and Bar pulled people into their lives . . . GB was constantly building relationships. Constantly . . . Johnny and Bucky Bush were in the office a lot. They called GB ‘Poppy,’ his growing-up name . . . My fiancé, later my husband, and I took Neil and Marvin to a lot of baseball games with the Washington Senators, and we took Doro ice-skating. We saw a lot of the younger kids.
“GB had a hilarious sense of humor. I remember a wig salesman came into the office selling falls and hairpieces. GB put on a fall with long flowing curls. He tore down the hallway to show Congressman James R. Grover, a Republican from New York who spoke with Long Island lockjaw. GB came back in the office and said, ‘Well, Grover didn’t like it. The man has no sense of humor.’”
As soon as George was elected in 1966, his father began working his connections to get him a prime committee assignment. As always, Prescott started at the top. He called Wilbur Mills, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the most powerful committee in the House of Representatives. No freshman congressman had been assigned to this committee since 1904, because Ways and Means was the preserve of seasoned men with expertise in tax law, especially those whose reelections were guaranteed. “Why waste satin on stand-ins?” reasoned the pragmatic chairman.
Prescott knew that a seat on Ways and Means was a leg up in congressional life, much like Andover and Yale in real life. So he prevailed on his friendship with Mills to make an exception for George. The chairman, a Democrat, said that the House Minority Leader Gerald Ford made all the committee assignments for Republicans, but Prescott, knowing how to flatter a powerful man, said that Jerry Ford would agree to whatever Wilbur Mills wanted.
George got his seat, but he never admitted his father’s intercession. Rather, in a letter to one friend, he ascribed the assignment to serendipity: “I hope you approved of my committee assignment. Let’s face it. There’s a lot of luck involved in this, and I was at the right place at the right time. But no matter how you skin it, it’s a real good break for a freshman Congressman to be on the Ways and Means Committee.” (The Bushes rarely acknowledge that privilege and position often account for their success; it is the reason, years later, George W. could run for President as an “outsider,” never publicly admitting that being the son of a former President might have helped elevate his political standing.)
Barbara Bush pushed the self-made man myth as much as anyone in the family. She did not blink when she answered the television interviewer David Frost’s question about Prescott helping his political son. “He never did,” she said with a straight face. “Nor did his father ever make a phone call for George, which I read fairly often. Never.”
Amassing wealth—or as the Bushes put it, “securing our future”—became their first priority, and each man declared his financial success an independent achievement. Even Prescott denied the realities of his family background and the stature of his father as one of the leading industrialists of his day. “[This] was consistent with perpetuating the myth of the self-made man,” wrote the historian Herbert Parmet, authorized biographer of George Herbert Walker Bush.
George, too, insisted that he had earned his fortune on his own, and never acknowledged that he had relied on his father and his uncle George Herbert Walker II for the thousands of dollars he needed in 1951 t
o start Bush-Overbey, the high-risk Texas oil venture that eventually led to his success with Zapata.
Before leaving Texas, George sold all his shares in Zapata and publicly declared his net worth with the clerk of the House of Representatives: $1,287,701 ($7,380,434 in 2004). At the time such full financial disclosure was unusual and quite admirable. George was the only member of the Texas delegation to make a voluntary statement of his assets, including a list of all his stocks. (Tax records and financial disclosure forms over the years indicate that he did not raise his net worth until 1992, when he finally retired from public service, joined the Carlyle Group, and began charging $80,000 for speeches and public appearances. By the age of eighty, in 2004, George Herbert Walker Bush was worth an estimated $20 million.)
He arrived in Washington as a freshman congressman in the minority party, which meant he was among the lowest forms of political plant life, but having declared himself a staunch supporter of the war in Vietnam, he felt he was part of the moral majority. “I will back the President no matter what weapons we use in Southeast Asia,” he said after Lyndon Johnson escalated the war. “I am for our position in Vietnam and opposed to those who want to pull out and hand Southeast Asia to the Communist aggressors.”
As his close friend James A. Baker III said: “George respects authority. Has deep respect for authority.” That respect—which his relationship with his father, and later with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, showed him almost powerless to overcome—plus his conventional mind-set put him at odds with William Sloane Coffin, the charismatic Yale chaplain who believed that American involvement in Vietnam was so legally wrong and morally repugnant that he counseled young men to resist the draft. Flabbergasted, George could not accept Coffin’s actions, which he characterized as “provoking lawlessness.” George was correct in such a description, for until Coffin tested the legal concept of civil disobedience, there was no protection in this country for expressing dissent—there was only arrest.
The day before the march on the Pentagon, October 20, 1967, Coffin arrived in Washington accompanied by 250 antiwar protesters, including America’s beloved pediatrician Benjamin Spock, the writer Norman Mailer, and the poet Robert Lowell. The potent mix of religion, fame, and Ivy League prestige drew mass-media coverage to their staged drama on the steps of the Justice Department. Before going inside to deliver a bag containing 994 draft cards collected at antiwar rallies that week, Coffin made a speech.
“We cannot shield them,” he said. “We can only expose ourselves as they have done. We hereby counsel these young men to continue in their refusal to serve in the armed forces as long as the war in Vietnam continues, and we pledge ourselves to aid and abet them in all the ways we can. This means that if they are now arrested for failing to comply with a law that violates their consciences, we, too, must be arrested for in the sight of the law we are now as guilty as they.”
To their disappointment Coffin and the men with him were not arrested, which unsettled their critics, including Kingman Brewster Jr., the president of Yale. Besieged by calls from outraged alumni, Brewster addressed the controversy kicked up by his chaplain at Yale’s Parents Day Assembly a week later. He read a letter written by a freshman to the Yale Daily News that he felt represented the majority of the student body:
Such a drastic choice as civil disobedience must be an individual one, as one suffers the consequences alone. One cannot allow himself to be sucked into the frenzy of a mass sign-in. One must be absolutely sure that he is not only opposed to the War in principle but is also willing to suffer years of imprisonment, a certain degree of public shame, and a specter that will follow him until he dies . . .
I truly admire those who are fortunate enough to have made up their minds as to how far they are willing to carry their dissent, or their approval. But I defend my right to be undecided—to carry my indecision right up to the day of my induction, if necessary. I will not sign an agreement, which I do not intend to carry out.
Yale’s president made clear his disapproval of the chaplain’s pronouncements and actions, but then he said:
Would Yale be a better place if the Chaplain were not free to pursue his own convictions, including the preaching and practice of non-violent disobedience of a law he feels he could not in conscience obey? I think not . . . Even though I disagree with the Chaplain’s position on draft resistance, and in this instance deplore his style, I feel that the quality of the Yale educational experience and the Yale atmosphere has gained greatly from his presence . . . his personal verve and social action . . . So I not only find it easy to condone what I disapprove . . . but I am also sure that your sons will look back upon Yale in 1967 as a better place to have lived and learned because of the controversies, including the draft resistance controversy, which so tax the patience of so many of their elders.
The Old Blues rose up in arms. Within twenty-four hours George got a letter from his Uncle Herbie (Yale 1927), who had received the Yale Medal, the highest award of the Yale Alumni Board, for raising over $2 million for his alma mater:
Just so you will be completely up to date on the Coffin affair. I am sending you the full release that was given out in New Haven Saturday on Brewster’s statement . . . I don’t know how you feel about it, but most of us here think Brewster’s statement leaves much to be desired.
Jonathan Bush (Yale 1953), who was working for G. H. Walker and Company, registered his disapproval in a letter to Kingman Brewster:
I agree with you that Yale is more important to the country than ever and that Yale is in effect training tomorrow’s leaders. I do not like to think that tomorrow’s leaders are being influenced by unpatriotic acts on the part of the university faculty.
I am sure you have received many complaints about William Coffin. I do not want to belabor the subject but I wish to add my protest also. Every time his name is mentioned in the paper, that of Yale is mentioned with him. I believe that is sad for our great institution.
George, too, was irate. He fired off a letter on his congressional stationery to the executive secretary of the Yale Development Board about Brewster’s speech. “The first part [disapproving of the chaplain] I liked,” he wrote. “The second part [defending the chaplain] I didn’t.” That was basically the extent of his analysis and the extent of his attempt to understand Brewster’s defense of his chaplain’s right to freedom of speech.
In a letter to a Houston constituent, George wrote:
The case of Reverend Coffin troubles me very much. I have discussed it with the Justice Department and as a member of the Yale Development Board, I am planning to protest to the President of Yale this weekend. The Justice Department simply tells me that they are “studying the matter” and also that they are waiting for a Supreme Court decision on the whole question of draft cards very soon. You are absolutely right about the lack of law enforcement in this area, and I have protested and will continue to protest. Those who stormed the Pentagon and deliberately broke the law were given minimal fines and for all intent and purposes were turned loose. This was totally wrong.
Getting no satisfaction from the Justice Department, George turned to the House Un-American Activities Committee, notorious for Communist witch-hunting, and received a three-page report dated November 7, 1967, on Dr. Benjamin Spock. Years later George stipulated that the HUAC report—which he included with the papers he donated to his presidential library—be sealed.
When he arrived in New Haven for Yale’s board meeting, George came armed with legal research showing that Coffin may have violated a statute of the District of Columbia code pertaining to selective service, which would also put him in violation of the U.S. Criminal Code. George reported back to his Houston constituent: “I did have a talk with Yale’s President Kingman Brewster. In fact, it turned out to be a full-scale debate with him before 80 members of the Yale Development Board.”
A “full-scale debate” is a rather inflated description of the one respectful question George posed, later acknowledged by Ya
le’s director of operations and development:
It was a great treat for us to have you with us. Everyone around here is still talking about your superb question from the floor about civil disobedience and the Chaplain. In bringing up the subject in the way you did you made a significant contribution to the success of the whole weekend and for that we are most appreciative.
Continuing his vendetta against Yale’s chaplain, George wrote to another constituent. He described the fifty thousand people who marched on the Pentagon as a “pitiful demonstration”:
As a Yale graduate and a member of the Yale Development Board, I have protested these actions . . . The Justice Department tells me they are not sure Coffin has violated the law, but I have two specific references which I am confident he has violated. It is a disgrace to my University and, more important, to our country. I will do what I can.
Mounting pressure finally forced the Justice Department to act. The FBI arrested Spock and Coffin with three other activists for receiving draft cards from those who refused to serve in Vietnam. Known as “the Boston Five,” the men were indicted for conspiracy to aid and abet draft resistance, a felony for which, if convicted, they could receive ten years in prison and be fined ten thousand dollars. Their trial in Boston, which came to be known as “the Spock Trial,” began May 20, 1968, at the height of the war.
Bracketed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King (April 4, 1968) and Robert F. Kennedy (June 6, 1968), the trial focused on the concept of civil disobedience, in particular on those protesters who believed that the massacre of the Vietnamese was an absolute evil. Yet the court barred all testimony that questioned the legality of the Vietnam War, and the moral point of the protesters was overshadowed by the continuing escalation of the war itself. In the end, four of the five men were found guilty, including Spock and Coffin, and sentenced to two years in prison. They appealed and the convictions were overturned in 1969. The government did not take further action. Faculty and students at Yale paid more than half of Coffin’s legal fees.