My Father, My President

by Doro Bush Koch

  The longtime White House correspondent for Time magazine, the late Hugh Sidey—who came to be a great friend of my father’s over the years—remembers the two competing events in the days before the “split screen” on CNN. “On Richard Nixon’s inauguration day in 1969, the White House press corps was all staked out at the Capitol and around behind the inaugural stand at the White House to record the new president’s every move. We at Time magazine were all fixed up with telephones and portable TV sets so we would not miss a beat. I recall sometime after the swearing-in of Nixon passing one of the tiny television screens and seeing a live shot from Andrews Air Force Base as former president Lyndon B. Johnson was preparing to fly back to Texas. He was being bid farewell by Republican Congressman George Bush, a fellow Texan. But it was such a unique gesture at that level of power I can recall pausing to watch the brief encounter, and to put it in the back of my mind that this new person—obviously climbing the political ladder with unusual grace and good humor—was one to watch.”

  President Johnson told my father that day that if he ever needed anything, to be sure to call on him. A year went by, and it was time to start thinking about what his next move would be, politically speaking. Dad wanted to run for Senate, but his friends were urging him not to. Dad was the first freshman congressman to serve on the powerful Ways and Means Committee in sixty-three years—and his friends were convinced that he was in an enviable position that would only get better with time.

  But Dad had a nut to crack, and it was another run at his old opponent Ralph Yarborough. The politics were complicated, and Dad turned to an unlikely ally for counsel, remembering President Johnson’s invitation to visit his ranch in the Texas Hill Country. So Dad asked LBJ for his advice about whether he should run for the Senate. President Johnson said, “Let me put it to you this way: the difference between the Senate and the House is like the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit!”

  The meeting at the Johnson ranch, which was supposed to be secret, got leaked to the newspapers and attracted some negative press for the ex-president. Dad didn’t care for himself but didn’t want to cause any political embarrassment for the former president in his Democratic circles. Like his own father, Dad was always someone who believed that Democrats and Republicans should and could work together. This Texas-style bipartisanship also surfaced in my brother George’s administration as governor.

  In 1970, Dad took President Johnson’s advice and went for the chicken salad.

  Chapter 5

  BAKER AND BENTSEN

  “Friendship means a lot to George Bush. His loyalty to friends, I think, is one of his defining personal strengths . . . Loyalty goes up, and loyalty goes down . . . He likes to say, ‘Where would we be without friends?’ He is right. In the end, our lives are defined by our family, our faith, and our friends.”

  —James Baker

  By 1969, Dad’s old adversary and a fierce opponent of Lyndon Johnson, Ralph Yarborough, was coming up on the end of his second term in the Senate and was going to try for a third. Because LBJ was still such a large figure in Texas—he had just published his memoirs and was building the Johnson Library in Austin—Dad had gone to the former president to see if he would actively oppose Dad’s candidacy. Once LBJ had been consulted, my father felt there was nothing to stop him from throwing his hat in the ring.

  James Baker was a recent widower, and Dad was trying to help get his mind on something else. Mary Stuart Baker had died young from cancer. Before she slipped into a coma two weeks before dying, Mom and Dad had gone to visit her and ended up being the last people outside of her own family to see her alive. Because of Robin’s death, Mr. Baker had felt he could lean on Dad when he was first told that Mary Stuart didn’t have much of a chance. After Mary Stuart died, her husband was absolutely heartbroken.

  “I was depressed and somewhat at loose ends, and it was George who helped me get back on my feet,” Secretary Baker said, remembering how Dad asked him to join his second Senate campaign. “He did it for one reason: he did it out of friendship, and he did it because he’s the most considerate person I have ever met. He did it to give me something to occupy my mind other than my grief. He reached out to a friend in time of need because that’s the kind of person that George Bush was and is.”

  At the time, Baker had a law practice in town, and he remembers the exchange he had with Dad about joining the campaign:

  “Well, George,” Mr. Baker said, “that’s a great idea except for two things. Number one, I don’t know anything about politics, and number two, I’m a Democrat.”

  Dad said, “Well, we can fix that latter problem.”

  They did, and Mr. Baker got religion right then and there.

  Dad had an excellent chance to win the seat because Yarborough’s position was a lot less certain than it had been during the 1964 campaign. Most important, perhaps, Richard Nixon, a Republican, occupied the White House in 1970. That would help.

  The situation dimmed considerably, however, when Lloyd Bentsen, a conservative Democrat who was Dad’s age—and was also a handsome, well-respected businessman—announced that he would challenge Yarborough for the Democratic nomination. Bentsen made his announcement on January 9, and Dad, not one to be scared off by the possibility of a formidable opponent, declared his candidacy four days later.

  Today, of course, Texas is one of the redder “red states,” but back in 1970 you might say it was one of the more yellow “yellow dog” states—meaning it was dominated by Democrats. In fact, when John Tower won the special election for the U.S. Senate in 1961—filling then-Vice President Johnson’s seat—he was the first Texas Republican elected statewide since 1870.

  During the 1970 Democratic primary, Bentsen waged a very aggressive campaign, attacking Yarborough from the right, calling him a radical and an ultraliberal, running a conservative campaign in a conservative Democratic state. It worked. Bentsen carried the Democratic primary with 812,000 votes, while Dad won the Republican primary with 87,000 votes.

  A win is a win, but the fact remained: the GOP was outnumbered ten to one.

  My brother George, who was twenty-four at the time, remembers driving with Dad the day Lloyd Bentsen beat Ralph Yarborough. To George, the whole campaign seemed to change in an instant. There was a stunned silence—then Dad, always the optimist, said, “We can win this one.”

  George had graduated from Yale and was serving in the Texas National Guard. When he had time off, he would jump in a car and travel around to various Texas counties campaigning for Dad—not easy in a state with 254 counties. That experience made a lasting impression on George. It gave him practical campaign experience in Texas, working to build the state Republican Party. But he also became “emotionally involved,” as Dad later put it.

  That year, 1970, saw the completion of the World Trade Center, the death of four students at Kent State who were killed during a protest of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, and Simon and Garfunkel were at the top of the music charts. I was eleven, attending National Cathedral School in Washington, taking tennis and piano lessons, and hanging out with my friends. Dad and Mom went back and forth to Texas to campaign, and when they were there, I stayed at my friend Libby Crudgington’s house.

  In my young mind, the fact that Dad was once again running for office meant there would be a flurry of activity and campaigning that would involve us as a family—participating in campaign ads, attending rallies, making posters. Mom campaigned with him and needlepointed “Bush” labels for straw handbags, which we both carried. The “Bush Belles,” a group of female volunteers from across Texas, would campaign with my parents and hand out literature at all the stops. They wore blue and white outfits with sashes, straw hats, and scarves that were red, white, and blue with stars and that said “George Bush” on them. They campaigned for Dad in all three of his Texas campaigns, and in their heyday there were sixty-six Bush Belles. My parents still keep in touch with some of the Belles, many of whom volunteer in his Houston office tod
ay.

  At one point during the Senate campaign, while George was stationed at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, Dad called him up and said he was throwing a party for Frank Borman, one of the first American astronauts to circle the moon, at the Alibi Club in Washington. The Alibi Club is a tiny hole-in-the-wall kind of place in town, not far from the White House. Dad thought George would get a kick out of meeting the astronauts, since George was in training to become a pilot himself.

  Dad also suggested that George bring Tricia Nixon along, who was roughly the same age as George and living at the White House. This suggestion is typical of Dad—he is always planning parties, getting groups of people together, and playing the part of the serial matchmaker (with a decidedly mixed record!).

  Arriving home from Georgia, George drove to the White House in Mom and Dad’s brand-new 1970 purple Gremlin with denim seat covers. (Author’s note: I checked, and the denim seat covers did indeed “come standard” on the 1970 Gremlin.) He remembers taking the elevator to the second floor and meeting Tricia in the family quarters.

  From there, George and Tricia got in a Secret Service car—leaving behind that very stylish Gremlin. They had a “nice time,” he recalled, despite the fact that she asked him not to smoke. They reportedly got back to the White House at a reasonable hour.

  President Nixon wasn’t home when George picked Tricia up, but in hindsight George now knows how Barbara’s and Jenna’s boyfriends must feel about their dates’ father being the president of the United States. He’s been there himself.

  Years later, incidentally, my mother and I went to a wedding shower for Tricia Nixon, during her engagement to Ed Cox. Despite the fact that Ed didn’t smoke and he didn’t drive a purple Gremlin, Tricia seemed very happy.

  A final postscript to this story: In 2005, I attended a dinner at the White House that the president and First Lady hosted in honor of Prince Charles of Great Britain and his new wife, Camilla, the duchess of Cornwall. It was a fun night, with my parents and my brothers attending. Prince Charles gave a wonderful toast, in which he said the first time he came to the White House, during the Nixon administration, they were trying to marry him off to Tricia Nixon. I gave the president a big smile. Prince Charles doesn’t know they have that in common!

  Whenever George’s National Guard schedule would permit, Dad enjoyed having George along with him on the campaign bus. As for George, I’d say the 1970 race was one of the reasons he became so involved in Dad’s later presidential campaigns—he loved traveling with Dad.

  In the end, running against a conservative Democrat in Texas in 1970 proved to be an insurmountable challenge—and Bentsen won with 53.4 percent of the vote. Dad made a solid showing for a Republican, but it was still a tough loss. (The Harris County campaign run by James Baker, incidentally, was more successful. Dad won 60 percent of the vote there, where both candidates lived.) Mom remembers that at the last minute, an initiative involving sales of liquor by the drink was put on the ballot, “and that caused a huge Democrat turnout” particularly in East Texas, a part of the state that is solidly Democratic.

  Pete Roussel, who had been on the campaign staff, analyzed Dad’s race: “When Senator Yarborough was upset in the Democratic primary by Lloyd Bentsen, you didn’t have the ideological difference that had been anticipated in that race. Nevertheless, in typical George Bush fashion, he ran a truly energetic and all-out campaign . . . One of the things he was up against was at that time a pretty powerful Democratic Party in Texas. Lloyd Bentsen was not only out there campaigning; Lloyd Bentsen had a very popular former Texas governor campaigning for him named John Connally, and he had a very well known former president named Lyndon Johnson who was living in Texas then campaigning for him. Late in the campaign, President Nixon came to Texas and campaigned in East Texas and Dallas for George Bush. In the end, though, Bentsen prevailed.”

  Pete also remembers the day after Dad lost: “Here’s a man who’d just gone through a grueling race for the Senate, giving it everything he had. It would have been the natural thing for many of us to sit around and feel sorry for ourselves. That’s kind of the way I was feeling. I went down to his office the next day, and what was he doing? When I walked in, he was on the phone calling people, trying to get jobs for the people in that campaign who were all out of jobs now. And I thought to myself, ‘I’ll walk down the street with my back broken to help this guy,’ based on that. It was such a typical act of kindness and loyalty by him.”

  Marvin sized it up afterward: “He and Bentsen agreed on too many things, and, at that time, Texas was a solid Democratic state. I blamed it on President Nixon. I thought that if he worked harder for Dad’s campaign, Dad would have won in a landslide.”

  I, too, took it hard. On election night, when I heard the news, I burst into tears.

  “What’s wrong?” someone asked.

  Through my tears, I answered dejectedly, “I’m the only person in the fifth grade whose dad doesn’t have a job.”

  The Houston Chronicle documented the scene in an article titled “Bush Concedes, Wishes Bentsen ‘Best of Luck’”:

  A little girl stood weeping in the corner, nestled in the arms of her older brother. He seemed to be fighting to keep back the tears. Their political candidate had just conceded the race. This poignant scene summed up the reaction of all the supporters of the two children’s father, George Bush, who had just publicly recognized his loss to Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. in the race for the U.S. Senate.

  I’m not sure which of my brothers the article was referring to, but one of George’s roommates said George was also tearful on election night. As the evening wore on, they both got sadder and sadder. But he took his cues from Mom and Dad, telling a reporter years later, “I learned that life goes on. I draw a lot of lessons from my dad. Since Mom and Dad didn’t think life was over, I didn’t either. I remember how gracious he was in defeat. I would have felt otherwise.”

  He added, “Dad was given a second, or a third, life and he went on. Good people go into politics. They sometimes win. They sometimes lose . . . It tells us there is something bigger than elections. Maybe that’s the big lesson I learned from 1970.”

  Senator Bentsen, for his part, went on to serve for more than twenty years in the U.S. Senate, and ran on the 1988 Democratic ticket with Governor Michael Dukakis against Dad and Senator Dan Quayle. Eventually, Senator Bentsen left the Senate to be secretary of the treasury in the Clinton administration.

  Senator Bentsen looked back on that 1970 Senate race in a letter to me before he died. He remembered being invited by Dad to the vice president’s house early in 1981 for lunch after church. “After a delicious lunch, I was near the vice president while looking around at the happy crowd, and I said, ‘I think I did you a favor back in ’70 in that Senate race.’ And he said, ‘Well, Lloyd, I guess you did—but I just didn’t understand it at the time.’”

  Chapter 6

  ELOISE AT THE WALDORF

  “President Bush taught me how valuable personal contact and human tenderness are to the job of diplomacy. He once told me, ‘The first call you make to someone should not be to ask them for something.’ It was the accumulation of small gestures of kindness, he believed, that built a relationship of trust between leaders and enabled them to work effectively together.”

  —Condoleezza Rice

  After losing the Senate race, Dad returned to Washington to finish out the last few months of his term in the House of Representatives. As has always been his way, he immediately turned his attention toward the future, rather than dwelling on the past. He thought about becoming U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and approached President Nixon about that position, then held by Ambassador Charles Yost. “I was fascinated by the politics of the U.N., the vote-getting and the contacts to be made,” Dad told me. “Even though Ambassador Yost was a senior career diplomat, the political forum which was the U.N. was not best for him and certainly not for Nixon, so he was asked to resign.” Moreover, President Nixon was under at
tack in New York City because the Republican mayor, John Lindsay, did not like the president. Dad liked the idea of representing the Nixon administration in New York.

  President Nixon, however, had his own plans for Dad: making him a special assistant to the president. Dad said that, of course, he would abide by whatever decision the president made, but he thought the U.N. job would be a better fit. It certainly would better serve President Nixon, who had no advocate in New York City. So Nixon relented, and within four months of that defeat in the Senate race, we were on our way to New York City.

  Since we were leaving Washington for New York City in the middle of the school year, the disruption became a social emergency for a sixth grader like me. Desperate times call for desperate measures; and just as Henry Kissinger made a secret trip to China, I made my own secret trip to Ed Curran, the headmaster at the National Cathedral School. Now, normally, I would have been mortified at the mere thought of doing such a thing, but in this instance I somehow mustered the courage to ask if I could board at the school instead of accompanying my parents to New York.

  Mr. Curran sensed this was a big step for me—having never seen me before in his office—and as he was a friend of my parents’, he let them know I was having trouble adjusting to the idea of leaving. Still, all three said no to the idea of a sixth grader boarding anywhere, and so that was the end of that.

  Fortunately, Secretary Kissinger’s trip was more successful!

  When Dad was sworn in as U.N. ambassador in February 1971, I started attending the U.N. International School in Manhattan along with the children of the other diplomats. By this time, my brothers George and Jeb were already living on their own, and Marvin and Neil were at boarding school—Marvin at Phillips in Andover, Massachusetts, and Neil at St. Albans in Washington, D.C. So it was just Dad, Mom, myself, and Paula Rendon, our housekeeper.