It was the essence of one of Bob’s favorite expressions: “Everyone should learn the meaning of that famous little four-letter word—work.” He also lived by the credo of his favorite high school football coach: “Practice as you play.” To Bob Bush that meant pursuing his business goals full-time, all the time. It was the rigorous schedule pursued by so many World War II veterans. In the service they had learned the importance of identifying an objective and pursuing it until the mission was accomplished. Also, they felt they had to make up for lost time. These were children of the Depression, with fresh memories of deprivation, and the postwar years were abundant with opportunities to make real money. They didn’t want to miss out.
At home, Wanda was in charge of raising the family—three boys and a girl. They later lost one of their sons in a car accident. The surviving children, Mick, Rick, and Susan, say Bob was often an absentee father, but he would tell them he was working so hard to make their lives better than his had been. Now that they have their own grown-up responsibilities they have a better understanding, but the boys still point out that their dad missed a lot of their Friday-night football games.
Summer vacations often consisted of Bob’s dropping the family at a cabin on a lake and then returning to work.
Bob also put the children to work in the rapidly expanding Bayview business empire at an early age. Mick laughs now when he says, “If I put my kids in the situation he put us in, I’d be in jail.” As soon as they were teenagers the boys were learning to drive forklifts and trucks in the lumberyards. Susan was always Daddy’s little girl to Bob, but he didn’t spare her his favorite four-letter word, either. As a teenager she had to work cleaning the toilets and other public facilities in the stores.
Wanda was the indulgent parent. She was up before everyone in the morning to get breakfast on the table, pack the school lunches, do the laundry, and act as the court of last resort if Bob refused to back down from “no,” his favorite initial response to most requests. That division of family responsibility and the lines of authority were not unusual in the households of veterans across the country.
There were moments of tension in the Bush family, but Wanda smoothed them over and, besides, the kids were the beneficiaries of Bob’s wartime heroics. He almost never talked about those awful days on Okinawa, but he belonged to an elite club and the family would be visited by other Congressional Medal of Honor winners, including the famous flier Jimmy Doolittle or the Marine Corps ace Joe Foss, later the first commissioner of the American Football League.
When Rick was in the eighth grade he began to become more fully aware of his father’s wartime heroics, but when he asked Bob about what it was like on Okinawa he remembers his father saying only, “Well, you know, it was very difficult. We had to dig foxholes. Hygiene was terrible. We had hair lice but we had a job to do, and mine was to help people hurt in the war. I was happy to do it.” Period.
As the business flourished and expanded into mobile homes, golf course construction, and ready-mix concrete—as well as the seven lumberyards and building supply stores—Bob began to relax a little. He took Wanda and Mick to the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, the first member of his generation to be elected president. It was notable for mother and son for two entirely different reasons.
Bob laughs when Wanda, to this day, gets a kind of dreamy expression as she describes meeting JFK at a White House reception. “He looked right into my eyes,” she says, “and even though I didn’t vote for him, I certainly thought he was handsome and charming.”
Mick remembers another reception for the Congressional Medal of Honor winners. Former president Harry Truman was the speaker. Mick was just ten years old but he could hardly believe what he was hearing. Truman was recalling his favorite Medal of Honor recipient. The former president said it was a young man from the West Coast who had promised his mother that he was going into the service to help people, not to kill them. Mick knew Truman was talking about his dad, but Bob did nothing to draw attention to himself, not even when he introduced Mick to Truman as the reception was winding up.
Rick was also struck by the modesty of the Medal of Honor winners. He noticed something else about those common men who acted with uncommon valor. “For them,” he says, “responsibility was their juice. They loved responsibility. They took it on head-on, and anytime they could get a task and be responsible, that was what really got ’em going.”
Nonetheless, Rick struggled for a time as a teenager when he realized what he’d have to live up to with Bob as a father. He acknowledges they clashed over lifestyle and values for a while, but he always tried to understand what his father had been through in the Depression and the war. As he puts it, “I try to assimilate his values but I also try to show him the difference.” Bob has another way of describing it. “Rick,” he says, “is a Porsche and I am a Volkswagen.”
Now that the children are in their forties, with kids of their own, and Bob and Wanda are in their seventies, they have a new Bush generation as common ground. Bob manages to work into almost every conversation the success of a granddaughter who graduated from Pepperdine College and immediately got a high-paying job with a Fortune 500 company. Or another granddaughter, a star basketball player, who’s also going to Pepperdine on a scholarship from the Medal of Honor Society, an organization made up of all living recipients of the coveted decoration. His daughter, Susan, a schoolteacher married to a building contractor, says, “Dad is all about family now. He built an extra-large house in Palm Springs so he can take care of all the grandchildren.”
The boys, Mick and Rick, also have a keen appreciation of Bob’s business skills. They followed him into the company, but on Bob’s terms. He sold each of them a lumberyard and building-supply store so they could be independent. As he put it, “I’m not going to give you the business. I am going to give you the opportunity.” He financed the purchases but they’ve had to make the payments.
He’s also available for advice, including the Bob Bush rules for operating a successful business. He told the boys that when they’re asked how the business is going, answer “Good,” never say “Great,” because your customers will think you’re doing too well. Don’t say “Terrible,” because they’ll think you’re about to go broke. He also told them to stay away from personal relationships with women who work in the business, and from stating their personal opinions about politics and religion in the office.
For their part, they’ve gotten him to relax a little more. As Rick says, “He’ll now play nine holes of golf. In the past he’d only play six holes before rushing back to the office.” Susan thinks she’s helped him lower the emotional walls a bit. She says, “He is a lot more loving and he hugs more than he used to, he’s a lot more emotional and openly affectionate.” Bob listens to all of this with a mixture of pride and bemusement.
So does Wanda, sitting just off to the side, looking a little wan. She’s going through a difficult bout with cancer and the prognosis is not encouraging. Bob is spending all of his time with her, consulting with doctors, trying to make her comfortable. She remains the light of his life. Besides, he agrees with their children when they say, as Mick put it, “My mom is the bravest person in this family today.” And Susan adds, “And Dad wouldn’t be where he is without my mom.” Rick chimes in, “I’ll second that.” Bob, the wartime hero and tough-guy businessman, looks at Wanda adoringly and smiles.
Bob Bush was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for conspicuous valor on Okinawa, but it was the thought of Wanda that got him home alive. Together they have had memorable moments as a result of that medal, and certainly the prosperity that came with Bob’s business success was a dividend, but it is their enduring love for each other and for the family they had together that is their greatest accomplishment.
JOE FOSS
“Those of us who lived have to represent those who didn’t make it.”
NO ONE would ever accuse Joe Foss of slowing down. Even now, at the age of eighty-two, he inhales life
in big, energetic drafts. He is in many ways the quintessential World War II hero. He grew up poor on a farm in South Dakota at the height of the Depression. He lost his father when he was a teenager. He was inspired to fly when he saw another midwesterner, Charles Lindbergh, on a barn-storming tour. He worked at a gasoline station after high school to earn money for college and flying lessons. After playing football and graduating from the University of South Dakota, he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1940. He quickly became one of the Marines’ most gifted pilots, and when war broke out he spent a year working at Pensacola as an instructor.
In the fall of 1942, Foss shipped out to Guadalcanal as the executive officer of a squadron of Marine F4F-4 Wildcat fighter planes. Foss remembers they were at sea, with their planes on a carrier, “wondering what it would really be like to finally be in the war.” They found out quickly enough when they were aroused from their berths in the middle of the night with the news that Japanese submarines were in the area and the pilots would have to launch their planes early.
Foss, who now lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, remembers that once the squadron was off the carrier and headed for Guadalcanal, “I knew what war was going to be like. As we came in low to Henderson Field on Guadalcanal, we could see bomb craters all around and the antiaircraft guns were firing at Jap planes overhead. When we landed, the Marines on the ground gave us a big reception, cheering and everything.” Those Marines were happy to have the help. They had been fighting steadily since August just to gain control of the field and hang on to it.
Tom Brokaw with Joe Foss, Two for the Money game show, 1957
Foss said to one of the Marine fliers who had been there awhile, “Well, I guess you veterans will show us around.” Foss says the Marine answered, “Oh, you’ll be veterans, too, by tomorrow.” Actually, it took a week. On October 16, 1942, Foss shot down his first Japanese Zero. By November 19 he had shot down twenty-three, an extraordinary number, but the skies over the Pacific were filled with fighter planes and bombers as the United States and the Japanese battled for control of the air and the sea lanes leading to the mainland of Japan.
In fact, on the day he shot down his first Zero, Foss was nearly shot down himself. In those days, aerial combat was practically face to face. Foss and the other pilots didn’t have laser-guided weapons and sophisticated computer systems telling them when to shoot. Those aerial battles were accurately called “dogfights,” two snarling high-powered fighter planes twisting and turning, each trying to get the advantage, the pilots hitting the buttons to fire the machine guns, while they continued to fly at speeds of up to 300 miles an hour at altitudes ranging from just a few feet off the ocean surface to high in the clouds.
The F4F-4 Wildcat was not as quick or as responsive as the Japanese Zero, so when Foss’s plane was hit, he knew he was in trouble. He had three Zeroes on his tail as he went into a steep dive and then a big, wide turn, trying to get back to Henderson Field with a dead engine and his propeller free-wheeling. “The Zeroes stayed right behind me,” he says, “and as I cleared the hill to land at Henderson they unloaded all their lead at me.” Foss landed the plane at full speed, with no flaps and little control in what is called a “dead stick” landing. The F4F-4 careened across the runway and skidded to a stop just short of some palm trees. Later his ground crew counted more than two hundred bullet holes in the plane. Foss, then twenty-seven years old, sat in his cockpit, badly shaken, thinking, Why did I ever leave the farm? Suddenly he heard the cheers of the ground crew, “kids eighteen and nineteen years old who had watched it all,” he recalls, “and I said to myself, Well, you’re a leader, Joe. You’re in it all the way now, and from that point on I was just a full blower.”
By January 1943, Foss had shot down twenty-six enemy planes, equaling Eddie Rickenbacker’s record from World War I. He had been shot down and forced to ditch at sea, swimming through the Pacific waters for twelve hours until he was rescued by island natives in a dugout canoe. Two days later he was back in the air.
His exploits included a breathtaking maneuver in which he dove directly toward a Japanese battleship to deliberately draw fire and make it easier for other American planes to torpedo the vessel. As he started his dive he radioed to the rest of the squadron, “Keep it steep, girls, keep it steep.” He figured a plane coming straight down would be a difficult target for the battleship guns. He was right, but it was an extremely risky maneuver. When Foss pulled out at the last moment, he was so close to the ship he could see the Japanese officers on the bridge.
He was indestructible. Though he was knocked off the flight line for six weeks by a bout of malaria, he came back to fly again. Foss, who had learned to shoot pheasants and ducks on the wing as a boy on the South Dakota prairie, was a warrior of the old school, mourning the losses of friends from his squadron but never crying. He carried a Bible and a pair of dice in his flight-suit pockets, wore a leather helmet, and chewed on a cigar when he was on the ground. He had a Marine’s vocabulary and a bellowing voice. One of his squadron members would say of him, “All the balls of any man who ever walked the earth.”
In the spring of 1943, the Marines decided Captain Foss had done his share and brought him home to a hero’s welcome, less than a year after he had shipped out. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and was put on the cover of Life magazine, the ultimate press accolade during the war. He had a hero’s swagger but a winning smile to go with his plain talk and movie-star looks. Joe Foss was larger than life, and his heroics in the skies over the Pacific were just the beginning of a journey that would take him to places far from that farm with no electricity and not much hope north of Sioux Falls.
Before the war ended, he returned to the Pacific for another tour, and he was invited to Australia to brief a squadron of British Spitfire pilots. He had just started his talk when he noticed the Englishmen were not much taken with this rough-hewn Marine with the barnyard style of speaking. So, typically, he just confronted them in his direct, take-it-or-leave-it way. “I said to them, ‘I know what you birds are thinking right now. You’ve been up there in Europe flying against the Germans, and you don’t need any advice from me. Lemme give you a tip: You’re going to underestimate the Zero, and when you do you’re going to land on the deck.’ Well, they didn’t pay much attention,” Foss said, “and when they went up against the Zeroes over New Guinea, seventeen or eighteen of them were killed, including their best flier.” It was a moment that crystallized Joe Foss’s philosophy of skill over style.
When the war was over, Foss went home to South Dakota and opened a charter flying service and a Packard car dealership before getting involved in Republican party politics, first as a state legislator and then as governor in the mid-1950s. Whatever their politics, South Dakotans like me were proud to have such a blue-ribbon war hero as the state’s chief executive. We could count on our largely anonymous state getting more attention with Foss in charge.
Besides, Foss, for all of his acclaim, was a South Dakotan through and through. He loved to hunt and fish and he still knew his way around a farm. His speeches were usually rambling affairs, filled with Marine or prairie colloquialisms. For example, he still likes to remind audiences, “Hey, if we hadn’t put up a scrap back there during the forties, you’d be living under the Japs or the Germans and I don’t think you’d like that very much.”
It was during his terms as governor that I got to know Foss personally. When I was seventeen, I was elected governor of Boy’s State, a weeklong program organized by the American Legion to expose honor students to the structure of government and the challenges of politics. As governor, Foss came to a lunch in my honor and we hit it off. Later that summer, he invited me to become his partner on a national quiz show that wanted to cash in on his war heroics.
It was a very generous gesture from this nationally famous figure, to reach out to an obscure teenager and offer a spot by his side on Two for the Money, starring Sam Levenson, live from New York. All of the questions were about American poli
tics, and we won $612 apiece, a small fortune in the preinflationary days of the fifties.
It was my first trip to New York, and when the show was over Joe asked what I was going to do. I explained I had to fly back early the next morning, but there was so much I wanted to see. He said, “I think you should stay a few extra days. I’ll get in touch with your parents when I get back and tell them it was my idea.” When I called home later that night to tell my folks that the governor thought I should stay a few days more, there was a long pause at the other end of the line. Finally, my father said, “Well, I think you should. You’ll probably never get to see New York again.”
Now that I’ve lived in Manhattan for more than twenty years, I often think of that night and the days that followed, when I went to Ebbets Field to see my beloved Dodgers in their final summer in Brooklyn, the trips to Greenwich Village, to the Statue of Liberty, and to the top of the Empire State Building, walking by Carnegie Hall, listening to Dixieland jazz from the sidewalk in front of the old Metropole Café at Times Square. By the end of my stay, I had a better understanding of what appealed to me and what I could handle. I knew somehow that this time my father was probably wrong. I would see New York again. Maybe Joe Foss knew that, too, as he encouraged me to stay.
In the fifties, Foss was busy on several fronts. In addition to his duties as governor, he was still flying as a senior officer in the Air National Guard and he was in demand at Marine reunions and other military gatherings around the country. But there were other challenges outside the public limelight. He had married his South Dakota girlfriend when he returned from the war, but they soon discovered that it was not a perfect union. Foss not only was gone a good deal on political or military trips, he was also an avid sportsman, so he had many invitations to far-off safaris and other hunting expeditions.
Tom Brokaw Page 11