When we first started, however, we couldn’t get circulation—presumably due to the porous, coral-like material we were dealing with just below the ocean floor. Finally, we got the well down and it was probably the most expensive dry hole that Standard ever drilled.
During my brief time in the offshore business, we also had some international projects of some note.
For example, we drilled the deepest offshore well at the time off the coast of Kuwait. This was also an over-the-side, floating rig effort. Shell drilled it, and we were partnered with Bill Clements’s company, SEDCO. This too was a dry hole—but the pay was good, and in a sense we were pioneers there as well.
We also helped Japan Petroleum drill in the Sea of Japan. We had a consulting contract with them, and they came and swarmed all over our rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Then we went over there as consultants, to help them drill their first hole. They had built a three-legged rig called the White Dragon that bore a tremendous resemblance to the Scorpion, and after they drilled that first well using our expertise we parted ways. They were very nice, and that also proved to be a good contract for us.
We sought contracts in Libya unsuccessfully—this was during the time before Qaddafi. I remember going there. We almost built a drilling rig in Greece. We drilled in Brunei, also partnering with SEDCO on that project. We drilled in Venezuela, in the Gulf of Paria. That was long before Hugo Chavez—the government was more hospitable in those days—then we moved the rig over to Trinidad, where we drilled for Rio Tinto in Trinidadian waters.
It was there in Trinidad that we ended up in a lawsuit with the company we were drilling for, and I went over to England with our lawyers to try and work something out. So much of our money was tied up in this deal, and I was so worried at the time, that I ended up passing out cold on the floor of a hotel room in London. I pushed the button for help, which was conveniently located down near the floorboards, and thankfully a man appeared because I had passed out stark naked—I was shaving at the time, and suddenly felt sick.
The valet came in and helped me into bed, then called a British doctor who said, “You have a bit of food poisoning, old boy.” He prescribed that I drink a bit of Coca Cola—which is the exact opposite of what I should have been doing, since in reality I had a bleeding ulcer. The doctor missed the diagnosis.
Unaware of my true condition, I went to my meeting at Lloyd’s of London that afternoon feeling very weak, where we conducted our business and I had a touch of sherry with lunch—again, not what I should have been doing given my situation. That night I flew back to New York on the slow-poke planes we had back then, transferred and flew to Dallas; and eventually I made my way back to Midland.
When I got to my doctor, he said, “You’re lucky you didn’t die. You have a hemorrhaging ulcer.”
I learned how to deal with that condition, which was good when other agonizing events would come along—such as trying to be elected president of the United States.
Other memories from my oil days: We always dreaded the onset of hurricane season. Our rigs were not nearly as weather-ready as they are today. When Hurricane Betsy slammed into New Orleans in 1965, it totally wiped out a rig where we had a third of our assets tied up. This was before GPS. I went out with our drilling engineer and rented a little Piper to look for it, but it had completely vanished.
They did eventually find part of it using sonar, but by then it was of no use to us; fortunately, the insurance company made good.
In the fall of 2005, after President Clinton and I surveyed the havoc wreaked in New Orleans and across much of the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina, I continued on to the small town of Cameron, Louisiana—which had been totally leveled by Hurricane Rita, which had followed in the wake of Katrina.
When I got there, I found one building left standing, which had been built with Works Progress Administration money back when Franklin D. Roosevelt was president of the United States. Every house, every warehouse, every library, every school, everything in Cameron was totally flattened. It was a very emotional experience for me, because my mind immediately shot back to 1957 and Hurricane Audrey, which nearly destroyed the town with a twelve-foot tidal surge that killed 600 people who were never told to evacuate. That was my first exposure as a drilling contractor to the devastation caused by hurricanes.
I saw dead bodies being taken out of homes and thrown on a work boat. I saw animals stranded on tiny strips of land, totally trapped by the water. That experience left a real impression on me.
During this same time, Dad’s father ran for, and won, a special election to the U.S. Senate from Connecticut.
Without question, my grandfather’s example of public service throughout his life inspired Dad later to run for office himself. Wherever he went, whatever he did, Prescott Bush had plenty of admirers.
“Senators respected him, whether they agreed with him or not. He had friends on both sides of the aisle. He was a gentleman with great dignity,” Dad says of his father’s public service. During the early 1950s in Midland, Dad ran into Senator Lyndon B. Johnson at a hotel, meeting him for the first time. He introduced himself as the son of Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush, and Senator Johnson replied that Dad’s father was the best thing that happened to the 83rd Congress. Dad boldly teased that he was glad to hear that from a staunch Democrat. “Your father and I don’t like to be thought of as Republican or Democrat, rather as good Americans!” Johnson said.
Prescott Bush ran for the Senate after a successful career on Wall Street. He didn’t start out in life as a politician—and neither did Dad or my brothers Jeb and George. It’s just not the way our family looks at politics. My grandfather Prescott passed down the idea that you would only run for office after you had built a financial base—then it was time to give back and go into public service.
When Prescott Bush first ran for the Senate in 1950, he lost by only a thousand votes. Then the man who beat him in the Senate race and became senator from Connecticut, Brien McMahon, died in office. Prescott won the special election to fill that seat in 1952—the year Dwight Eisenhower was elected president in a landslide—and then served out the rest of McMahon’s term and was reelected in 1956.
During that special election in 1952, a photographer arrived at the Bush home in order to take some campaign publicity shots of the family. Uncle Johnny remembers how the man suggested that Prescott and Dorothy pose in the kitchen together, with Dorothy preparing dinner and Prescott peeling potatoes. “That’s a great idea,” teased my dad, who was visiting from Texas. “Somebody show Dad where the kitchen is.”
An interesting footnote: When I spoke to former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis for this book, he told me that while he was an undergraduate at Swarthmore, he attended the Washington semester program at American University. It was the fall of 1954, and he was in the gallery of the United States Senate the day that Senator Joe McCarthy was censured. He saw my grandfather Prescott stand up and speak out against McCarthy.
“That was not an easy vote, let me tell you, and he stood up,” remembers Dukakis. “He was active in Planned Parenthood in the late forties in Connecticut, too. That was not an easy thing to do, in a heavily Catholic state. My sense of your family really started with him.
“Joe McCarthy may be the single most important reason I got into politics, because I couldn’t stand the guy. I thought what he was doing was terrible,” Dukakis continued. “I cannot exaggerate how tough it was for good people in politics to stand up and take this guy on. In some cases they were defeated—Millard Tydings was a Democratic senator from Maryland and he took McCarthy on and got beaten, because of it. It was hysteria sweeping the country. To have some folks—particularly on the Republican side of the aisle—stand up and say, ‘This is wrong,’ was very, very important.”
My grandfather was a popular senator, known as an advocate for fiscal responsibility including the line-item veto for the president. He had other firm convictions as well.
“When he was first ele
cted in 1952, he vowed to get out of the Senate before he turned seventy,” said Dad. True to his word, in 1962, at the age of sixty-seven, Prescott Bush announced he would not seek reelection to the Senate and returned to Wall Street.
In 1959, right before I was born, Zapata Off-Shore split from Zapata Petroleum Company. My dad took control of Zapata Off-Shore, and our family moved to Houston. By this time, my mother was an expert in packing and moving a household, but with four boys and another child on the way, it couldn’t have been easy.
Soon after arriving in Houston, Dad joined the Houston Country Club and paired up with a recent University of Texas Law School graduate named James Baker as his doubles partner in tennis. Another lifelong friendship—one that would help influence the course of global events in the decades to come—was forged.
Secretary Baker remembers with a smile how the tennis pro at the club, Hector Salazar, “would throw points so that it looked like we were doing a lot better than we were. He would play ‘customer tennis,’ and I’m not sure your dad ever really accepted the fact that that was happening. He’s competitive.”
Even if Dad was in denial over Hector’s generosity on the court, Secretary Baker recalled how Dad more than returned the favor off the court.
“Hector didn’t have much money, and the rest of us didn’t have much either,” Mr. Baker said. “Your dad decided we needed to get a pot together to buy a car for Hector. I remember thinking that I couldn’t afford to pay the upkeep on my car, but anyway, I think he was successful in getting a car for Hector.”
Dad passed the hat quietly among Hector’s many fans so the tennis pro wouldn’t have to take the bus to work anymore.
After settling into our new life in Houston, Dad began to actively pursue another interest of his—politics. Mom was not surprised when Dad agreed to run for Harris County Republican Party chairman in the fall of 1962 after a group of his contemporaries urged him to do so.
In the early 1950s, Dad had actually gotten his first taste of local politics in Midland. “There were no Republicans in those days in West Texas,” Dad told an interviewer once. “I mean, there just weren’t any. Barbara and I ran the first primary ever held in Midland, Texas. Republican primary. And as God is my witness, three people voted all day long in the primary: Barbara, me, and some drunk Democrat, saying, ‘Is this where you go to vote?’ ”
The campaign was covered by, among other media outlets, a neighborhood newsletter hand-printed by my brothers: Jeb (ten) was editor, and Neil (eight) and Marvin (six) were reporters. “Mr. Bush is running for chairman of the Republican Party,” the newsletter reported matter-of-factly. “He has four sons and a daughter. He urges everybody to vote for him.”
Harris County, being very large, was comprised of more than 270 precincts, and Dad insisted on visiting every last one of them. That race marked the beginning of my father’s signature style of campaigning—leave no hand unshaken, no letter unwritten, no speech unspoken.
Thankfully, it paid off: My brothers were able to report that “Mr. Bush wins unanimously as head of Harris County Republicans.”
He was on his way.
The staff of the Neighborhood Round-Up was able to report that Dad was elected chairman of the Harris County Republican Party.
Chapter 4
JUMPING INTO POLITICS
“That’s one that his mother taught him: never gloat when you win. When you don’t gloat when you win, you don’t tend to pout when you lose. There’s a fine balance in life and he found that balance.”
—Alan Simpson
My earliest memory of my father goes back to when I was five years old, in 1964. After serving as Harris County Republican Party chairman, he was running for the U.S. Senate from Texas against the incumbent, Senator Ralph Yarborough. Yarborough was a legend in Texas, out of the liberal wing of the Texas Democrats. There had been a split among the state Democrats in those days—in fact, President John F. Kennedy had gone down to Dallas to try to patch things up on that fateful day in November 1963. Yarborough was there in Dallas for the president’s visit, and many believe that his ongoing feud with right-wing Democrats led to Yarborough sitting in the second car, rather than up front with the president in the first car. Conservative Governor John Connally was in the president’s car, and he, too, was shot that day but survived.
Yarborough had been elected the junior senator from Texas in 1957, joining Lyndon B. Johnson, who was the senior senator. Smilin’ Ralph, as everyone in Texas called him, had a reputation for aligning himself with the national party rather than with his colleagues from Texas. As a Republican, my father saw an opening as Yarborough continued to distance himself from the moderate-to-conservative state Democratic Party. Of course, I don’t remember this firsthand; I only learned about it as an adult. All I knew at the time was that Dad was running for Senate.
I do remember my parents being very busy and there always being a lot of people in and out of our house. There seemed to be a lot of hustle and bustle, things moving very quickly from a small child’s point of view. I also remember photographs being taken of us children with a baby elephant—a live baby elephant and we were sitting on it! As a five-year-old girl, getting to ride on top of a baby elephant was like living a dream. I didn’t even know what the Republican Party was, much less that the elephant was a symbol of the GOP and a donkey the Democrats.
At one point that fall, my brother Marvin remembers seeing Dad’s smiling face on a billboard. He felt proud, confused, a little intimidated—and for the first time realized that maybe “our lives might be different from the other kids in school.”
Marvin also remembers walking into our house on Briar Drive in Houston in 1964 and seeing “bodies all over the place.” Of course, he meant live bodies—campaign volunteers making posters in just about every room. There was a core group that came over to the house pretty regularly to work on the campaign, usually on weekends, drawn by Dad’s charisma as well as the free burgers and hot dogs my parents supplied.
The Black Mountain Valley Boys out of Abilene, Texas, usually joined Dad on the bus during that campaign. They would go into small towns, set up on their flatbed truck, and play music. Then Dad would get off the bus and make speeches to whoever had gathered.
In the end, my father lost the election. My brother George, who was eighteen at the time, was driving to the “victory” party when he heard on the radio that Dad had lost. He remembers feeling devastated. It’s something that every political family must learn to cope with—the disappointments that go with the territory.
For his part, my dad was disappointed but remained optimistic. He told us all we’d win the next time around.
I could sense the tension, and I remember all the unhappy faces. As a five-year-old, I couldn’t possibly understand that he made quite a credible showing given that Lyndon Johnson was the 1964 Democratic presidential nominee running against Republican Barry Goldwater, in the aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination. Having Johnson at the top of the ticket certainly didn’t hurt the Texas Democrats, nor did the fact that Johnson was the heavy favorite. Dad, as a relative newcomer, could be proud of how well he had done.
A week after the election, Dad wrote to Richard Nixon, who had been the losing Republican candidate for president in 1960 against John Kennedy. Nixon had campaigned for Dad and then returned to his New York law firm, when Dad wrote to him: “We got whipped, and whipped soundly, but out of the gloom on November 3 there are some bright spots.” He pointed out the magnitude of the Johnson landslide, and its long coattails in Texas. Johnson beat Goldwater by some 700,000 votes, but Yarborough beat Dad by only 300,000. The Bush campaign, moreover, polled over 1.1 million votes, the most any Republican in Texas had ever gotten until then. He thanked Nixon for his campaign visit, adding, “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.”
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br /> As much as Dad loved running for office, the people he had met in Texas were even more important to him. Here’s a letter I recently received from Bessie Liedtke, the wife of one of Dad’s business partners at Zapata, describing what happened on election night:
This is from my heart. My mother and I were very, very close. She died the very day George H. W. Bush lost the senatorial election to Ralph Yarborough. He took the time to call and console me about my mother, and this was a time when he had to be very disappointed about his own loss. He probably does not remember doing this, but this speaks volumes to me about the kind of man he is and I shall never forget it.
Dad returned to Zapata after the election, and in September of the following year, 1965, Hurricane Betsy barreled into the Gulf of Mexico. The oil industry sustained over $100 million in damages from the storm, $5.7 million of which was due to the loss of a highly successful Zapata offshore drilling barge called Maverick. While three other Zapata rigs survived the storm, Maverick vanished in the hurricane without a trace. This was very upsetting news to Dad, because Maverick’s disappearance meant the loss of a major drilling contract, as well as plans for a proposed merger.
Taylor Blanton, a longtime friend of our family, expanded on Dad’s recollections of that storm and remembered visiting with Mom when Dad returned from looking for the rig. “I remember him saying it was impossible for this rig to have just disappeared completely, but they had flown back and forth over the area until they were sure it was not there, and had just disappeared underwater. No shouting, no cursing, no anger—just dejection and sadness at losing something so vital to Zapata and to his business future,” Taylor told me.
Taylor became a fixture at our house during his college years, and he remembers Jeb, Neil, and Marvin skinny-dipping on hot summer nights in our pool in Houston. “When your parents wanted them to get out and go to bed, your dad would yell, ‘Here come the Vanderhof girls!’ and the boys would grab towels and run inside” to avoid being seen by the neighborhood girls.
My Father, My President Page 6