The Family

by Kitty Kelley

  As his university was being battered like a ship in the winds of a hurricane, George Walker Bush, a senior in 1967, made his debut in The New York Times. While the father was defending his country’s right to bomb Southeast Asia, the son was defending his fraternity’s right to “brand” its pledges.

  “It’s only a cigarette burn,” George W. said. “There’s no scarring mark physically or mentally.”

  Triggered by an exposé in the Yale Daily News about fraternity hazing, accusations arose that George’s fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon, engaged in “sadistic and obscene” initiation procedures. “The charge that has caused the most controversy on the Yale campus is that DKE applied a ‘hot branding iron’ to the small of the back of its 40 new members,” reported The New York Times.

  “I can’t understand how the authors of [that] article can assume that Yale has to be so haughty not to allow this type of pledging to go on at Yale,” said George. As the fraternity’s former president, he said the branding was done with a hot coat hanger. “It’s insignificant,” he said. “Totally insignificant.” He claimed Yale’s fraternities had the least severe initiations in the country, adding that Texas fraternities used cattle prods.

  In the twelfth cycle of the Vietnamese calendar, 1967 was the Year of the Goat, but for Americans it was the year of death. More U.S. soldiers died in combat that year than in all the war’s previous years. By the end of 1967, more than 480,000 American troops had been sent to Southeast Asia, more than in the Korean War at its peak. Already American involvement in the Vietnam War had lasted longer than in World War II, and the weekly bomb tonnage dropped on North Vietnam had exceeded that of all the World War II tonnage dropped on Germany. Antiwar demonstrations in the United States, once filled with long-haired lefties out of the antinuke movement, became more mainstream as the middle-class mothers of the ten thousand expatriates who had fled to Canada took to the streets. In December 1967, President Johnson announced a traditional Christmas cease-fire and grounded the B-52s while he visited the troops in Cam Ranh Bay.

  Congressman George Bush also took advantage of the lull to visit Southeast Asia. He left Houston the day after Christmas for sixteen days in Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. Upon his return, he issued a statement of rah-rah optimism, expressing “an overwhelming sense of pride in my country.” He did not realize that he had been bamboozled by the military promise of “light at the end of the tunnel.” Nor did he recognize the trap of open-ended conflict that would ensnare even more American troops. Rather, he reported “in every aspect of the war—political, economic and military—I saw or heard evidence of progress.” He urged patience on the part of the United States. “The losses the enemy is taking are heavy, and the Viet Cong are gradually losing their grip on the people in the countryside. These factors will ultimately force them to quit.”

  Two weeks later the enemy that was supposedly “losing their grip” launched an offensive during Tet, the Buddhist lunar holiday. With more than eighty thousand North Vietnamese troops, they attacked every major city and most of the provincial capitals. The Vietcong had now pushed the battle from the jungles to the cities, and though they suffered huge losses, they gained a psychological and political victory with the element of surprise. The Tet Offensive turned the American attitude toward the war, especially after the respected CBS newsman Walter Cronkite reported on his trip to view the aftermath of the attacks.

  Highly critical of U.S. officials, Cronkite contradicted official statements on the war’s progress. He criticized American leaders for their foolish optimism and advised immediate negotiation, “not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” (Negotiations would start and stop until the Paris Peace Accords went into effect in January 1973, and U.S. troops were withdrawn. South Vietnam soldiered on until Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975 and the country was reunited. The loss of American lives exceeded fifty-eight thousand.)

  On March 31, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection. “If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite,” the President confided to friends, “I’ve lost the country.”

  The President was pushed to his decision by Democratic Senator Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota, who stunned the country by nearly toppling the President in the New Hampshire primary. McCarthy’s showing (41 percent to 49 percent for LBJ) was considered an enormous victory for the antiwar movement.

  “When Johnson made the announcement that he was not going to run for President,” recalled Mark Soler (Yale 1968), “the bells of Harkness Tower, the main carillon on campus, started ringing. There was incredible jubilation all over.”

  The country’s view might have been changing, but George Herbert Walker Bush remained stubbornly committed to the war, even when family and friends tried to dissuade him. As early as 1954 his father had opposed sending “ground troops into the swamplands of Indochina.” Prescott had said then, “If our military support is needed over there, I believe it should be limited to sea and air forces.” Ten years later he said that escalation of the war had lost the United States the good opinion of the world.

  “There’s hardly any section of the world . . . which is enthusiastically behind our position in Southeast Asia . . . and this hurts. This makes it more difficult for the President to implement his policy . . . It’s a lot more comfortable to have world opinion with you on any major foreign policy issue than it is to be suspect, or to enjoy the disapproval of a large section of [the] world.”

  Still, George remained a hawk. He believed that the Tet offensive was not a military setback for U.S. forces, and that only campus liberals believed that South Vietnam would not triumph over the north. He wrote to Richard Gerstle Mack, a fellow Bonesman, on Easter Sunday, 1968:

  I just don’t buy that this is an immoral war on our part. If you want to argue that all war is immoral—fine; but this selectivity and this blind willingness to emphasize the weaknesses of the South Vietnam government while totally overlooking the terror of the VC and the past slaughters by Ho and the boys I can’t buy . . .

  The thing that amazes me often is the arrogance and total lack of compassion on the part of some doves who suggest that those who don’t want to turn tail and quit really don’t want the war to end . . . These smart critics are immune to the repeated abuses, the sheer terror and torture of the VC.

  Four years later, in 1972, George was forced to reassess his condemnation of war protesters for their “arrogance” and “lack of compassion.” His son Jeb, then eighteen, had pulled a low lottery number in the draft—number twenty-six—and he told his parents that he was thinking of becoming a conscientious objector. As Barbara Bush recounted to the UPI in 1984, “George said, ‘Whatever you decide, I will do. I will back you 100 percent.’” But the family was spared its crisis. The draft for Vietnam ended one day before Jeb, who had already passed his physical, might have been called. When Jeb ran for governor of Florida years later, he disputed his mother’s recollection.

  Although he had not been needed for his second-born son at the height of the Vietnam War, Congressman Bush had been able to pull the golden cords of his connections for his eldest son, who enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard on May 27, 1968. At a time when 350 Americans were dying in combat every week, George W. was twelve days away from losing his student deferment from the draft. He had taken the Air Force pilot-aptitude test and scored only 25 percent—the lowest acceptable grade—but because he had the powerful intercession of Ben Barnes, the Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, George W. was allowed to jump over the year-and-a-half waiting list of 150 names and be admitted to the Guard. He was given one of the last two slots for pilots, was sworn in as an airman on the day he applied, and became a second lieutenant without ever going to Officers’ Training School. On his application, he specifically checked the box that read: “Do not volunteer for overseas service.”

  The last time such magic occurred Cinderella’s fairy godmothe
r had waved a wand over a pumpkin and said, “Bippity bobbity boo.” Colonel Walter B. “Buck” Staudt, commander of the Texas Air National Guard, said almost as much when asked to explain the preferential treatment for George Walker Bush: “He said he wanted to fly just like his daddy.”

  The son described his thought process to a Texas interviewer twenty years later: “I’m saying to myself, ‘What do I want to do?’ I think I don’t want to be an infantry guy as a private in Vietnam. What I do decide to want to do is learn to fly.”

  This attitude was typical of the Bushes. They accept the privileges that their status confers on them without question. They do not acknowledge their privileges or relate them to others’ lack of same. Consequently, George W. as President could vehemently oppose affirmative action as some kind of “quota” and not see his acceptance to Yale and his easy entrée into the National Guard as any sort of equivalent.

  Of course, young George was not the only son saved from Vietnam by a powerful father. A report by Congressional Quarterly showed that of the 234 sons of senators and congressmen who came of age during the war, only 28 went to Vietnam, and of that group, only 19 saw combat—a stark testament to rank and privilege.

  The Vietnam War dominated the era, but President Johnson and Congress had other issues to deal with as well. The last vestige of legal discrimination was put to the test in the spring of 1968, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King and the riots that inflamed the inner cities. The House of Representatives scheduled a vote on the Federal Fair Housing Act, which prohibited discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing. The bill had passed the Senate, narrowly avoiding a filibuster, and President Johnson wanted his signature in place as the capstone of his legacy.

  Having campaigned against civil rights in 1964, and against open housing in 1966, George Bush was expected to oppose the Fair Housing Act in 1968. But he received a letter from a young constituent who had worked for him for two summers as an intern. The young man, Charles G. “Chase” Untermeyer, who was from Houston and had graduated from Harvard in 1968, took it upon himself to advise the congressman to seek his better angels. He recommended that George vote for open housing as the right thing to do. He quoted Edmund Burke’s definition of a legislator’s function in a free society: “Your representative owes you not only his industry, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serves you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

  George thought so highly of Untermeyer that when the young man received his Navy commission, the congressman recommended him as an aide to Rear Admiral Draper L. Kauffman, commander of the U.S. naval forces in the Philippines. Admiral Kauffman just happened to be the brother-in-law of Prescott Bush Jr.

  By April 1968, George knew that he would have no opposition for reelection. His Houston district was so safe that the Democrats didn’t even bother putting up a token candidate. He could easily vote for open housing without facing political consequences. So he dashed off a quick response to Untermeyer:

  I am most grateful for your “unsolicited views” on open housing . . . I’ll vote for the bill on final passage—have misgivings—giant political misgivings—also constitutional—also I know it won’t solve much . . . but . . . in my heart I know you’re right on the symbolism of open housing . . . This will be my character builder and friend antagonizer—and your letter helped me decide.

  Initially, on the procedural vote, George tried to scuttle the bill and send it to conference, which was an attempt to stall passage, weaken the legislation, and kick it back to the Senate, where it would surely be defeated on a filibuster the second time around. In a newsletter to his constituents, he said that he had tried to sabotage the bill as written because of “certain legal concerns.” When that attempt failed, the House called for a vote on the bill itself, and George found his voice.

  The next day he wrote to Untermeyer:

  Charlie-me-boy:

  . . . Yesterday I voted for the Civil Rights bill. Today, I am being fitted for my lead underwear. And Sunday, I go back to Houston.

  Although George had served in a segregated Navy, belonged to whites-only clubs, and lived in houses with restrictive covenants, he was not totally blind to the disproportionate number of poor black men serving in Vietnam while the white sons of privilege, including his own, stayed home. The disparity between America’s privileged whites and poor blacks was never as cruel or as clear as it was in the rice paddies of Southeast Asia.

  When George returned to Houston for a town meeting, he recalled his trip to Vietnam. “I chatted with many Negro soldiers there,” he said. “They were fighting, and some were dying, for the ideals of this Country; some talked about coming back to get married and to start their lives over.

  “Somehow it seems fundamental that this guy should have a hope. A hope that if he saves some money, and if he wants to break out of a ghetto, and if he is a good character and if he meets every requirement of purchases—the door will not be slammed solely because he is a Negro, or because he speaks with a Mexican accent.”

  George told friends that the meeting started “with catcalls and boos” and ended with “a standing ovation.”

  Unaccustomed to any criticism, he was stung days later by the negative mail he received. For a man who thrived on adulation, even a slight rebuke was a body blow. He referred continually to “the venom and vitriol” he experienced. He wrote to one friend about the “seething hatred—the epithets—the real chicken shit stuff in spades—to our [office] girls: ‘You must be a nigger or a Chinaman’—and on and on—and the county crowd disowning me and denouncing me and wondering if they could ‘still continue to support me’—and . . . the snubs by legislative candidates who were wanting my support and fawning all over me a couple months ago.”

  He wrote to another friend about “the hundreds of letters I have gotten . . . boy does the hatred surface . . . most of the mail has been highly critical . . . emotional and mean.”

  As the years passed, George tended to recall his stand for open housing as if it were accompanied by a haunting trumpet that signaled some lone act of stupendous bravery instead of a rare attempt to do the right thing—and suffer no political repercussions. He had been one of nine Texas congressmen to vote for the bill, but he frequently forgot to mention the other eight. After interviewing both George and Barbara Bush in 1988, Gail Sheehy wrote: “As a congressman in 1968 he was the only member of the Texas delegation to vote for open housing.” The writer said she didn’t think to verify the vote of the Texas delegation, because she assumed the Bushes had been telling the truth. “I should have known better,” she said.

  By that time the man who had magnified his college involvement with the United Negro College Fund had slipped onto the dangerous shoals of exaggeration and the lies of omission. He emerged years later with an aggrandized view of himself that was as distorted as a fun-house mirror. When the time came to build his presidential library in College Station, Texas, he approved in the monument to himself an exhibit that crowned him with the laurels of integrity.

  The display is titled “A Profile in Courage,” from the title of John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book about men who stood up for principle at great political cost. Visitors to the library read the following about a young Texas congressman:

  In 1968 Congressman Bush voted for the Open Housing Bill, which prohibited discrimination in housing and property right. The America of those years was still in turmoil over Civil Rights and Bush’s position on this issue was not well received among his conservative constituency in Houston. Local opponents believed that passage of the bill would lead to “government control of private property.”

  After the vote hate mail from segregationists poured into his Texas office. George Bush met his critics head on. Appearing before a hostile crowd in the Memorial West section of his district he calmly but firmly staked out his philosophical ground, reminding the audience that African Americans and Hispanics were at that very moment under enemy fire
in Vietnam, serving their country. Discrimination against these men, here at home, just was not right. “Somehow,” he concluded, “it seems fundamental that a man should not have a door slammed in his face because of race or color.”

  After a moment of silence, the audience rose to their feet clapping and cheering; the young congressman had won the day.

  After only eighteen months in the House of Representatives, George became frustrated with his role as a lowly congressman. He and his father decided he was ready for national office: he wanted to be Vice President of the United States. Together father and son mounted a campaign to persuade Richard Nixon to make George his running mate in 1968. Helping launch this long-shot campaign was his father’s good friend Rowland Evans, whose political column with Robert Novak was syndicated by The Washington Post. Two months before the Republican convention Evans and Novak’s June 5, 1968, column was headlined: “Young Texas Congressman Bush Gets Nixon Look as Running Mate.”

  “Evangelist Billy Graham, a keen judge of political talent, recently transmitted to his friend Richard M. Nixon an unusual suggestion: Rep. George Bush of Texas for Vice President,” wrote the columnists. “This possibility is based on Bush’s television style, regarded by Dr. Graham as among the best of current practicing politicians. Nixon has been particularly impressed by spontaneous comments from newsmen covering his campaign that Bush was the sole redeeming feature of the otherwise dismal television spectacular by Republican Congressmen early this year.”

  Seizing on the national publicity, George and his father devised a campaign to impress Nixon with George’s influence in the corporate worlds of business and finance, the mother lode of political fund-raising. Prescott again called in his political and social IOUs, and within days Nixon received letters from thirty-five of the most important Republicans in the country beseeching him to select George Bush as his Vice President. Some of the names on Prescott’s list included George Champion, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank; Donald B. Lourie, chairman of the Quaker Oats Company; Daniel C. Searle, president of G. D. Searle and Company; Walter Hoving, chairman of the board, Tiffany and Company; and John E. Bierwirth, chairman of the board, National Distillers and Chemical Corporation. Other corporate giants included Overseas National Airways; Pennzoil United, Incorporated; Northwest Bancorporation; Hanes Corporation; J. P. Stevens and Company; First National City Bank of New York; and, of course, the Bush family’s standbys: Brown Brothers Harriman and G. H. Walker and Company.