What It Takes (29 page)

Barbara was what parents call a big-boned girl: at age twelve, she stood five-foot-eight and weighed, as she would forever recall, one hundred forty-eight pounds. Pauline had definite ideas on food, and the Pierces sat to a splendid table: garden vegetables shining with butter, mashed potatoes, real cream for the cereal. ... Pauline would urge: “Eat up, Martha ...
Not you, Barbara
...” It was maddening: Martha stayed thin, no matter what. Barbara might have taken the contrast more to heart were it not for her father (whose big bones, after all, she’d inherited) defending his favorite.

Marvin Pierce was a big, broad-faced man, easygoing, funny, a splendid athlete at Miami of Ohio, yet another scion of good Midwest manufacturers who’d moved the family east to New York, and thence to the stately commuter town of Rye, New York, as he climbed the ladder at McCall Publishing. By the time his third child, Barbara, was born, Marvin had long since learned to survive his wife’s fierce certainties with resort to irreverent humor and the quiet pleasures of the golf course.

Barbara learned to survive, too, with her own mix of irreverence and imagination. She was a great reader, not only of the classic girls’ books of the day,
Little Women
,
Jane Eyre
, and the dog stories by Albert Payson Terhune, but also the serial stories that appeared in her father’s McCall company magazines. Then, too, there were McCall pattern books, suitable for Barbara and her friends to cut up, to dress a thousand paper dolls, for romance and daring exploit in all corners of the world. There was her dog, Sandy, to run with, her bike to ride through the neighborhood, tree-climbing, rope-skipping, swimming in Long Island Sound, tennis lessons (Barbara had her father’s—ungirlish, at the time—love of sport), and a general unconcern for dainty appearance. Even after she’d slimmed down to quite a lovely young woman herself; even after she’d followed Martha’s path, and Pauline’s notion of proper education, to three years at a finishing school (Ashley Hall) in South Carolina; even after she’d followed Martha, again, to Smith College (where Martha had been discovered by
Vogue
and photographed for its cover as “College Girl of the Year”); even after Christmas ’41, when her large bright eyes and open smile, her off-the-shoulder green-and-red dress, her flowing auburn hair and soft, pale skin had attracted the notice of Poppy Bush across the dance floor at the Round Hill Club in Greenwich, Connecticut, Barbara Pierce was a young woman notable for not putting all her stock in appearance. Identity (hers, at least) was distinct from pose. She was, fetchingly, Not That Way. In fact, as Poppy was amazed to discover, as they sat out a dance, then a second, and a third, she was better at spotting airs or airheads, better at eschewing pretense, more direct, more down-to-earth, than he! And why not? Poppy was Not That Way as an act of civility. But Bar was a natural: hers was an act of survival.

As for her, she thought he was, well ... wonderful. Attractive, accomplished at school, funny ... he wasn’t stuck-up like some big seventeen-year-olds could be ... he was just ... perfect! Bar would later tell her children that she married the first man she ever kissed. (It always made them retch when she said it.) Later still, when she was campaigning, and her life was laid out for viewing on a hundred hotel coffee tables, she was always asked:
How did you know he was The One?
Well, she’d say, it was simple: “Whenever he came into a room, I had a hard time breathing.”

But for the moment, for a long time, there was still the family. ... Right after that fateful Christmas dance, Barbara came back from the Round Hill Club and mentioned she’d met a nice boy, Poppy Bush. That was at 2:00
A.M.
By the time Barbara awoke the following day, Pauline had been on the phone all morning, finding out
everything
about the family. (Thank heaven, all reports were good.) Even after matters had progressed for two years, and Poppy and Bar were adult enough to plan a marriage, there was still a supply of female family wisdom:

“Now Barbara, you’ll have to pick out silver, and you must get the most ornamental pattern you can find. Take it from me, dear, it’s so much easier to clean ...” So Bar scoured the stores for the plainest, flattest silver made. It was time to get out from under.

For a while, marriage only stepped up the family pressure. Greenwich and Rye were ten miles apart, and now, of course, they were in constant communication. At Christmas, and like family conclaves, Poppy and Bar would drive back and forth for breakfast at one house, lunch at another, a stop with the uncles (Poppy didn’t like to disappoint), eggnog here and supper there ... like Ping-Pong balls in a closed room! One day, when she was very pregnant with Georgie, and visiting in Greenwich with Pres and Dottie, Bar hauled herself out of a chair, and announced she had to visit in Rye, her parents ... she was expected. ... Pres Bush said sternly, but just as a joke: “Did we give you permission to visit those strangers?” It was no joke to Bar. She dissolved in tears.

She never really said to Pop: “Let’s get out ...” She didn’t have to. That was one of the great things about him, about them together. There was so much they just knew ... and from the beginning. Sometimes, people asked her: How did Poppy propose? Well, he didn’t. They just started planning. Of course, she didn’t propose children either. She just took care of it.

She knew Poppy was as eager as she to get out on his own. Maybe more: he’d been to war, he’d seen the world. Now he was hustling through Yale in two and a half years, but he wasn’t just going to scrape through. With his straight A’s in economics, letters in soccer and baseball, as the last man tapped for Skull and Bones—only fifteen chosen, the best of the best—he could have been a lock for a Rhodes scholarship, an extra year of study at a university in England. But what was the point? George Bush wasn’t interested in more theory. Anyway, a family of three would never make it through a year on the stipend. Poppy would have to ask his folks for money—that’s another thing he wanted to get past. He wanted to be out on his own—Bar and he even talked about farming, the most self-sufficient family life ... but after they found out how much it would cost for land, seed, stock, equipment ... well, Poppy wasn’t going to ask Pres for that kind of dough. No way!

So, it was business. That’s where the action was, anyway. With the rationing lifted and factories switching to production of cars, washers, fridges,
televisions
! ... things were on the move ... fortunes being made. The wave of strikes that followed the war was mostly over now, and the engine of U.S. business was never going to sink back to the sleepy sputter of the thirties. If the theories in his economics class meant anything, that was the lesson: America owned the world’s markets as no other nation had before. (If the government would get its hands off the levers, there was no telling how fast, how far, the great ship of progress could sail!) American business won the war, and now it
ruled
this brave new world. And here was Poppy Bush, bred to captaincy, just itching to work his way to the helm. Wasn’t it great how it turned out?

But he had to start somewhere, and fast. He was a senior already! Procter & Gamble had a trainee program; he talked to their recruiters, but ... no soap. Lots of fellows were going into banking, or stocks, pure business, the capitalism of capital. And that would have been easy for Pop. Gampy Walker had split away from the Harrimans and formed his own investment bank, G.H. Walker & Co. His son, Herbie, was running the company now. He would have leapt to take Poppy on. For that matter, there were whispers that Brown Brothers Harriman might even bend its own strict rule on nepotism. ... Pres Bush’s son was a star!

But that wasn’t the way: not for Poppy. If he’d wanted to play it safe and sound, he never would have signed up to fly on his eighteenth birthday: could have started Yale five years ago. Where was the adventure in that?

In the stiff-upper-lip world of the Walkers, no one tried to
talk
to Poppy about his choices: certainly not! ... Unless he asked, which he wouldn’t. Of course, they’d do anything for him: they were so eager, it was almost uncomfortable. When Poppy and Bar would show up in Maine, it was like the prodigal son had returned: Kill the Fatted Calf! Uncle Herbie—the second G.H. Walker, and the second patriarch of the Point—just
adored
Poppy, idolized him. George Bush could do no wrong: George was a winner, a star at school, a hero in war, a pilot—the knighthood! Herbie’s dream was to fly with Poppy. Of course, Herbie didn’t know a thing about flying. He was scared to death of thunder and lightning! But he learned to fly at the close of the war, and went out to Detroit and
bought an airplane
. But then he started to fly it back East, and hit a snowstorm and couldn’t go on; couldn’t get back to Detroit, either. So, in the end, he landed his new plane in a cornfield and just walked away. That was the end of Herbie the Pilot.

But it didn’t cool Herbie’s ardor, not at all. Whenever he’d hear Pop and Bar were coming up to Maine, Herbie dropped
everything
in a frenzy of setting up golf games, tennis matches, picnics, dinner parties. He started a whole summer baseball league ... Poppy’s coming! Everyone thought it was awful for Herbie’s own sons, Bert and Ray. Herbie was so obviously in love with their cousin. Poppy didn’t quite know what to do about it. He always tried to be extra-nice to Bert and Ray.

It was just another thing that would be ... easier, once Poppy and Bar got away on their own. As for going into business with Herbie, in his firm, well ... that didn’t seem like a good idea.

Pres’s great friend (and fellow Bonesman) Neil Mallon, in Cleveland, had been unofficial godfather to the Bush kids. He knew Poppy was hunting a place to start on his own. So he talked to George about the Texas oil fields: that was the place for a young man to make his fortune. Mallon was the head of Dresser Industries (Pres Bush served on the board, of course), and Dresser owned Ideco, an oil-field equipment company. Why didn’t George go out there as a trainee, learn the oil business from the ground up? Mallon didn’t have to say the rest: he didn’t have any kids of his own. ... If Poppy liked what he saw of Ideco, and Dresser, well ... there’d be opportunities.

Poppy liked what he heard. He’d been posted to Texas in the Navy for a couple of months. It was wide open ...a whole new world ... a thousand miles away. And everything about Texas oil had the air of great doings, men and fortunes larger than life. Like everyone else of his generation, Bush had seen the stories in
Life
magazine, the
Fortune
profiles of H.L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, Sid Richardson, Eamon Carter. They were Giants in a Giant Land. ... Oil! Black Gold! ... What an adventure!

So Poppy came back from his talk with Neil Mallon and said to Bar, he thought he’d get a job with Ideco, the International Derrick and Equipment Company. It was the oil business! ... A trainee’s job ...
lots
of opportunity ... starting wage just over three hundred dollars a month.

It sounded good to Bar. Reasonably stable. And she knew Pop would do well, wherever he chose to work ... and if it didn’t turn out, well, they’d find another way. Pop was Phi Beta Kappa at Yale, after all. It’s not like they were going to another country ... were they? ... Where is this?

“Odessa, Texas,” he said.

Bar paused a couple of beats and then favored Poppy with a radiant smile. “I’ve
always wanted
,” she said, “to live in Odessa, Texas.”

Phyllis saw him first in March, across the mess hall at Percy Jones. He was still thin, had his arm in a splint, but what she noticed was his sharp dark eyes, his high brow and thick shining hair, the strong bones in his face. Phyllis said to her friend: “Who’s
that
?”

“Oh, that poor Bob Dole. He doesn’t have long to live, you know.”

“Isn’t that sad ... such a nice-looking man.”

Of course, her friend was behind the times: Bob Dole was going to live, and he was going to do something with that life. He was back at Percy Jones after Dr. K.’s operations, but he knew now it was just a way station.

He wasn’t waiting anymore for a miracle. The hospital still gave him curare treatments for tremors, and therapy in the whirlpool every day, but he was working on himself in every way. He’d found himself sort of a job, selling Oldsmobiles modified for wounded war vets. He sold a couple at Percy Jones, and in the bargain, got himself a blue sedan with a left-hand gearshift. It wasn’t long till the Army put a stop to such business. But that didn’t mean Dole had to give up, to lie around in bed, or play bridge all day.

He and a couple of buddies were tearing through the books in the hospital library: there wasn’t anything Bob Dole didn’t want to know. At night, they’d sit up talking books, until the nurses called lights out ... at which point, they’d sneak off the ward, and steal across the street, to a coffee shop that stayed open till two. Bob was thinking about getting out of the Army, going back to school, getting a degree. He’d talked to Kelikian about it. Maybe he could be a lawyer. “Why not?” said Dr. K.

It was March 12 when Bob showed up at the Officers’ Club dance. Phyllis and her friends had done the decoration: it was Heaven and Hell—Hell, with the pictures of devils in flames, was the bar; it was in Heaven, the dance floor, under painted clouds and angels, where Bob spotted Phyllis, sitting with a group of nurses at a table. He stood straight and tall—no splint—in his uniform, as he walked up and asked her to dance.

“I’d love to,” she said.

He couldn’t put his right arm around her back—not by himself. But he put it on her hip, and Phyllis stepped right in. Years later, in Russell, she’d advise their women friends: “Dance close to Bob ...” They always thought she was making a joke.

Phyllis Holden wasn’t the kind to make jokes—not about things that mattered. She’d grown up in rural New Hampshire, a girl so tenderhearted she never could stand teasing. Sometimes, like every well-loved child, she’d do something so cute that her parents laughed with joy. But Phyllis thought they were laughing at her, and she’d start to cry. As she came of age, there was a softness about her that drew a flock of young men. But until she got to Percy Jones, she was not lucky in love.