by Kitty Kelley
On his thirty-first birthday, July 6, 1977, he heard that George Mahon was retiring from Congress after forty-three years of representing Midland and Lubbock. He astounded his parents when he told them he was going for the seat. Having been part of his father’s campaigns, George, naturally gregarious, was drawn to the political arena. As his cousin Elsie Walker once suggested, he probably knew on some level that winning an election would also win his father’s attention and admiration, which were so sorely missing.
George announced his candidacy in July 1977, and two weeks later his friends Joe and Jan O’Neil introduced him to his polar opposite, Laura Welch, thirty, who lived in Austin but happened to be in Midland visiting her parents.
“We were the only two people among our friends who had not yet married,” she later joked.
No one expected the introduction to ignite, least of all the O’Neils, but within a week George had arranged to visit Laura in Austin. He left for Kennebunkport in August and called her two or three times a day. Not long after one phone call, he cut short his vacation and returned to Texas.
“I think he called and a man answered in Laura’s apartment,” said his mother.
Weeks later George brought Laura to meet the family, and Jeb fell down on one knee and flung open his arms: “Brother, did you pop the question, or are we just wasting our time?”
George and Laura married in November 1977, three months after they met, at the First United Methodist Church in Midland. The small ceremony was attended by immediate family, including George’s grandmother. When Dorothy Walker Bush asked the bride what she did, Laura replied, “I read.”
Barbara later said that Laura’s reply was: “I read and I smoke and I admire.”
A self-possessed only child, Laura had grown up with the full and undivided attention of doting parents, unlike George, who had had to compete for his father’s attention with four siblings and the all-consuming pursuit of politics. As the debutante daughter of a prosperous Midland builder, Laura entered Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1964, where she joined the top sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta, and majored in education.
“When I started at SMU, girls still wore dresses to school the whole time,” Laura said. “It was a fairly conservative campus compared with how it was just a few years after that for the little brothers and sisters of my friends. Even growing up in Midland, they had a different experience than we did. So we weren’t wild like that. I mean, people smoked cigarettes—and I did. And they drank beer, and that was sort of the way college kids were wild when I was there.”
Laura is remembered by some SMU students for not being as conservative as most. She smoked marijuana, backpacked through Europe after graduation, and supported the antiwar candidate Senator Eugene J. McCarthy when he ran against President Johnson in 1968. Laura enrolled in graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin and received her master’s in library science. At the time she met George, she was an elementary-school librarian. She was also a Yellow Dog Democrat who thought that Lady Bird Johnson was the finest First Lady the country had ever known. Laura, who said she became a Republican only by marriage, spent her honeymoon and the first year of her marriage campaigning in West Texas with her husband.
“It was the district both of us had lived in for a lot of our lives,” she said. “So we made the drive together every day for a year, driving up and down, campaigning two counties wide, straight up the Panhandle of Texas right on the New Mexico border.
“It was a very nostalgic drive for me. It was a drive I had made many times with my parents when they would drive up to see friends or to go to homecomings at Texas Tech. It was also a time for us to be alone in the car. Newly married—especially after having such a short engagement—it really gave us a chance to know each other. It gave me a chance to see him . . .
“When it was over and he lost, we were disappointed, but I really don’t remember it as a huge disappointment. We still felt very optimistic about the things we wanted to do. The way we got to know each other on that race was one of the best parts. He went back to work as an oilman, and I stayed home. He was not so handy around the house. I had to remind myself how great he had been on the campaign trail.”
During this time George Herbert Walker Bush told a friend that he was constantly churning, barely able to tolerate the workaday world. He wanted nothing so much as to be back “in the action.” Constitutionally incapable of staying at home, he traveled constantly, and campaigned for Republicans, who would then be obligated to do the same for him when he announced for President.
Initially, some of George’s friends were taken aback by his presidential presumption, because he had never even won statewide office. John E. Caulkins, a banker in Detroit, recalled his reaction when George phoned him.
“I’m going to run for the presidency.”
“Of what?” asked Caulkins.
“The United States.”
“Oh, George . . .”
Eventually his friends and associates came to share his belief that he was special and gifted and therefore entitled to aspire to the highest office in the land.
“If Jimmy Carter can be President,” George said, “then anybody can be President.”
He wrote letters constantly, even excusing himself from family occasions like Thanksgiving and Christmas to fire off notes to friends to set up his political network. The only purpose that engaged him was the pursuit of high office.
In the midst of his presidential sprint he received a disturbing call from his mother, who said that her brother—George’s beloved Uncle Herbie—had terminal cancer. George was soon to lose his biggest benefactor. He sat down and wrote another letter:
You have shown me how to be a man. You have taught me what loyalty is all about. You have made me understand what it is to make a commitment, “bet on a guy,” as you’d say, and then stick with it through thick and thin. Without your friendship and support, I’d never have had the confidence to dream big dreams . . . I’m wit ya, Herby, not just ’cause you handed me the future and made my life sing; but, selfishly, because I need you as my father, my brother, and my best friend. You see, I love you very deeply.
Love, Poppy
George Herbert “Herbie” Walker Jr., a short, squatty bulldoggish man, idolized his tall, slender nephew, who moved through life with the grace of a gazelle. George Herbert Walker Bush was seven years older than Uncle Herbie’s oldest son, George Herbert “Bert” Walker III, but Poppy seemed to have the old man’s heart in a way that his two sons never did.
“I can’t remember any individual who my father had greater respect and affection for than his nephew, George Bush,” said Bert Walker. “Dad never took much enjoyment from his immediate family. If you got him cornered, he would talk more about the Bushes than the Walkers. This . . . made me kind of jealous when we were younger . . . resentful . . . and . . .”
“It made me mad as hell,” said Bert’s younger brother, Ray Walker.
Uncle Herbie’s last act before dying was to call for his checkbook. He wrote a five-thousand-dollar check—the maximum contribution allowed under the law—to George’s political action committee, Fund for Limited Government. George Herbert Walker Jr. died on November 29, 1977, at the age of seventy-two. His obituary appeared in Greenwich Time, The New York Times, the Portland Press Herald in Maine, and the Yale Alumni Magazine. His funeral at the Second Congregational Church of Greenwich was celebrated by no fewer than three high clergymen. He was buried in the Walker family plot in Kennebunk, Maine.
The homage paid to Uncle Herbie as the financial patriarch of the Bush family dynasty contrasted sharply with the unmentioned death of George’s black-sheep uncle Jim the following year. George had been monitoring his uncle’s demise from afar, probably hoping that Jim would die before the scandal of his life became public.
FBI files described Jim as “a ladies’ man” with “a stormy marital career” who bragged about his extramarital affairs. In an e-mail, his third wife, Lois Nie
dringhaus Bush, wrote:
JSB died in 1978 in the Philippines. He was married the day we were divorced and left for Italy [with a woman named Gloria]. He lived there for about six months and then moved alone to the Philippines . . .
I [do] not want to go into the marriage after mine. My life was not beautiful for a while. I never wanted to know Gloria nor do my children.
The Bush family has declined to provide any further details about the life and death of Prescott’s younger brother, whose last known address in the United States was Inter-Mundis Capital Service on Broad Street in New York City. The State Department cremated his body and sent the remains to the United States from the Veterans Memorial Medical Center in Quezon City in the Philippines. Under the Freedom of Information Act, the State Department produced a redacted report of the death—not the death certificate—and asserted that all other records for James Smith Bush “no longer exist,” including the written consular reports of the Foreign Service officers who visited him regularly and reported back to George Bush. There were no obituaries and no death notices, nothing to draw attention to the family’s disgrace. All that remains is a small granite stone tucked in the corner of the Bush family plot in the Putnam Cemetery of Greenwich, Connecticut, and the recollections of two Foreign Service officers who visited Jim Bush during his final days.
“As a consular officer in the Philippines, I would go to visit him,” said Charles Stephan. “This was about six to nine months before he passed away. Another consular officer and I would check in on him regularly, and then report back to George senior . . . The Bush family knew where Jim was and that he was poor—destitute really—and blind.
“I knew he was considered the black sheep of the family because of his many marriages, but there was more to it than that . . . Yes, I guess I did know about the embezzlement, but I did not know all the details.”
Fred Purdy was acting Consul General of the U.S. Embassy in Manila when he received word that CIA Director George Bush wanted him to look in on his uncle. “I was told that George would be sending money for him that came from his sisters, George’s aunts . . . I would pick up the money from the CIA unit and take it to Jim. I first went to visit him when he was living with a Filipino street woman he had met in a bar. She was in her thirties; he was in his seventies. He was almost blind at the time, crippled, and unable to move. He was sleeping on a large piece of woven wicker suspended from two sides, sort of like a hammock. He smoked a lot and had burned the wicker bed in several places. He was drinking as much as he could, but he had problems getting liquor. When the Filipino woman realized he didn’t have much money, she started cutting him off . . . Eventually I got him moved into a veterans hospital.”
By then James Smith Bush was alone and as poor as a pauper. “He was a man fallen from the top,” said Fred Purdy, “and everyone in the family seemed to have shunned him . . . Nobody ever came to see him, and I don’t remember him ever having any mail either . . . but he did not complain. He seemed rather resigned to his circumstance, as if he had accepted that it was his fault. He mentioned his brother, Prescott, once, and I think I recall him mentioning one or two wives and several children, but he never heard from any of them . . . He didn’t offer to talk about himself or his past. He was eager to find out what was going on in the world, and any news I had about George was a little plum for him.
“I liked him very much. I first went to see him because of the George Bush connection, but then I kept going because he was a nice human being. He was very intelligent and kept up best he could by radio with current events. He was not in much pain when he finally died. Pneumonia had set in, but what really got him was cirrhosis of the liver and lung cancer. Before he died in 1978, he said, ‘I think George is going to run for President’ . . . and he added, ‘He’ll make a good one.’”
James Smith Bush died on May 2, 1978, at the age of seventy-seven. A few weeks later George wrote a note to Fred Purdy: “I want to thank you for what you did for my Uncle Jim. He had great ups and terrible downs but you saw him as a human being and I appreciate that.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
George Herbert Walker Bush wanted the White House more than anything else in the world. “I mean, like, hasn’t, uh, everybody dreamed about becoming President someday?” he asked a reporter from Women’s Wear Daily. He had no strong purpose other than his burning desire to become President of the United States. By 1979 he had come to feel he was entitled to the honor, and his wife agreed. So they decided to dedicate themselves to the pursuit. Barbara took her Christmas card list, now up to eighty-five hundred names, and George took his Rolodex from the Republican National Committee, and both hit the road in opposite directions. They rarely saw each other for the next year. George was determined to follow Jimmy Carter’s strategy and make himself a household name by winning the first two important primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire. From there, George figured, if he spent every waking hour campaigning, everything else would come his way.
On the road, he was accompanied by one of two aides, either Jeb’s young friend David “Batesy” Bates or Cody Shearer, whose mother had grown up across the street from Barbara in Rye, New York.
“Batesy and I were like his adopted sons,” said Cody Shearer. “We jogged with the old man, played tennis with him, and carried his briefcase from city to city on that campaign.”
In his sprint toward the White House, George raised and spent $22 million ($49.7 million in 2004). He traveled 329 days in one year—1978–79—and covered more than 246,000 miles in forty-two states. He campaigned with indefatigable energy.
“I have covered a lot of political candidates during the last twenty-five years,” Roy Reed wrote in The New York Times, “but I have never known one—not even Hubert Humphrey—who ran with more zeal and determination.”
“Oh, God, George went at it nonstop,” recalled Shearer. “He set a pulverizing pace. Sometimes we would hit three or four cities in one day. Of course, we concentrated on New Hampshire and Iowa. That was the strategy: win those two—win the nomination. That’s how George was programmed. He spent 1978 traveling to put his organization in place and 1979 traveling to campaign . . . I remember we were in a hotel somewhere. His room was next to mine and there were a bunch of girls in the room on the other side of me raising hell, dancing, pounding the walls, and playing loud music. Around midnight I hear George get up and rip open his door. So I get up to see what’s happening. George is standing there in his monogrammed pajamas. He bangs on the girls’ door and tells them to pipe down. He’s trying to sleep. The girls, of course, don’t know who he is. I suggest maybe we join the fun. ‘No. No. No,’ George says. ‘Gotta stay focused. Gotta stay focused. Gotta get up early. Gotta shake hands.’ Then he pads back to his room in his monogrammed pj’s.”
Bush’s breathless pace winded even reporters.
“How long are you going to stay out campaigning?” one of them asked.
“Until I run out of underpants,” said George.
The men looked perplexed.
“Did he just say . . . underpants?” said the reporter from The Baltimore Sun.
David Remnick later wrote in Esquire, “[Bush’s] problems of style are known among some correspondents as ‘the weenie factor.’”
Some reporters wondered why George was banging his wings so furiously for a nomination that seemed to be preordained for Ronald Reagan, the two-term governor of California who had been campaigning since he had lost the 1976 nomination to Jerry Ford. But George considered the sixty-eight-year-old Reagan a doddering old fool. He told an aide: “The age thing is going to get him.”
Just to make sure it did, George ran TV spots of himself jogging. The not-so-subliminal message: energetic fifty-five-year-olds don’t die in the saddle. His advance team tried to make sure he was always introduced as “a man in his physical prime, a man for the ’80s.”
George looked at politics through the narrow prism of his own privilege, and sometimes he could not see beyond his sense
of entitlement. He was so blinkered he could not imagine that a Hollywood actor bankrolled by rich, rabid right-wingers could ever become President of the United States. Since George did not comprehend that a President’s most valuable asset is his ability to communicate, he missed the gigantic import of Ronald Reagan. Unlike Bush—who had insider connections, an outsize sense of his own political destiny, and a blind faith in his own sense of entitlement—Reagan had a message, and it was one he delivered masterfully. He also had a devoted following built up from his years on the road as a spokesman for General Electric.
But George Bush totally dismissed Reagan. Bush believed the man he had to beat was John Connally, the three-term governor of Texas who had become a Republican after Nixon made him Secretary of the Treasury. George and his campaign manager, James A. Baker III, made no effort to hide their revulsion when it came to Connally, a poor Texas boy who had hard-scrabbled his way to millions. Snobbishly, Bush and Baker looked down on Connally as nouveau riche. They considered the former governor of Texas not to be of their class and not worthy of their social consideration.
“They hated him,” said David Keene, a political consultant who later became head of the American Conservative Union.
“You know, the problem with you is that you’re pissed because John got the tennis court and you want it,” Keene told George.
“You really don’t understand me, do you?” said George.
“What do you mean?”
“None of the clubs that I belong to would accept John Connally.”
The most damning indictment of rags to riches is always leveled by the rich who have never known rags, only monogrammed pajamas.