What It Takes (31 page)

“Why do you have to get an A? Isn’t a C good enough?”

And Bob snapped: “
You
tell me how to study a C’s worth, and
I’ll do it.
All I know’s how to work till I get it.”

He taught her how to play cribbage, but he didn’t play, he had work to do. No one was going to have to cut Bob Dole any slack. There was a couple nearby who became good friends, and they’d go swimming, but Bob wouldn’t undress. He didn’t want anyone to see his problem. She could cut up his food for him at home, but not at a restaurant. He’d have them cut it in the kitchen and bring it out that way. He meant to be strong, and she relied on that, too.

One night, that autumn, when they were at dinner, Bob suddenly lurched in his chair, slumped over his plate and gasped: “Omigod ... s’get to the VA ... on the double.”

Phyllis was scared to death. She was twenty-three, had never stayed a night alone. She’d never even driven in Tucson by herself. And now Bob was in the hospital. ... It turned out he had another blood clot, but thinners took care of it. He was fine, in a week. Yet what she remembered was her shock, the way he looked at that moment, so frail! ... It had never occurred to her that Bob could get sick.

The big excitement that fall was the Jugoslav who came to visit, to study American oil operations. The head office of Dresser sent him down, with carte blanche. But that didn’t mean the good ol’ bubbas wanted foreigners—a commie!—snoopin’ around. So the eager Jugo gentleman got kicked down the ladder and landed in the lap of ... George Bush.

What fun! It went on for days and days. George and Bar took the guy all over West Texas. Took him for barbecue. Took him to a football game. The fellow had his notebook, with everything he wanted to learn, and anytime a fact penetrated the language haze, he’d write this, too, in his book. The big thing he wanted was ...
skiddarig
. That was a shortcut they’d figured out in West Texas. If a hole was dry or played out, and the drilling equipment was needed elsewhere, they wouldn’t have to take down the rig: they’d move it whole,
skid
it, sometimes hundreds of yards down the field, to the next location. Well, that was the cat’s pyjamas at the Ministry in Belgrade, in ’48. “
Skiddarig?
” the Jugoslav implored. So George Bush, whose highest attainment in the oil business, to that point, was a clerkship in an equipment warehouse, learned how to skid a rig ... and how to explain it without benefit of words.

Words weren’t Bush’s strong suit, anyway. There was something extraverbal about his friendliness, his eagerness, the way his smile bent his whole body toward the guy, or the light, friendly bubba punch to the shoulder to show he was making a joke, the way Bush flung his legs out when he sank into a chair at home, told the Jugoslav that
he
could feel at home there, too. It was an animal thing ... the same bodily aw-shucks with which Bush let Texans know they needn’t mind his back-East college-boy talk.

How could they mind, when he was so happy to get to know them, to make their home his, to have them think well of him? Hell, here he was, after a few months, West Texas’s own ambassador to the foreigners. Thing was, he was so ... accepting. Here was a fellow who came from outside, but he didn’t act like it ... didn’t judge them like a stranger. Wasn’t that way. The way they saw it, the way they said it. Bush was just a hell of a good guy, tried to fit in, played the game.

As for him and Bar, they’d decided: they
loved
West Texas. The way people took you in! ... You couldn’t find nicer folks, no matter where you went. ... Late that fall, they decided they weren’t even going home for Christmas. Of course, they’d miss everybody back East: they sent out, must have been a
hundred
Christmas cards ... but it was just too long a trip with a two-year-old in tow. And they had their own life to live now, even for the holidays. So they made their own preparations in their half a house, and they did their shopping and found a tree, and everything was ready by Christmas Eve. ...

Ideco had a party that afternoon—a West Texas custom, Bush figured—and customers and friends dropped in, and George helped out, mixing drinks. And he wanted to fit in and be friendly, of course, so as they hoisted each glass he poured, he’d hoist one, too ... and he did fine until a whole ’nother set of guests trooped in, a second shift to the office party ... but he poured more drinks and, just to be friendly ... It got to be dark, and well past dark, and Bar was still waiting with the dinner at home, and the tree was there, undecorated, and it got quite late, and George was being friendly, fitting right in, on his own now, and ... Anyway, they brought him home in the bed of the company pickup, rolled him gently out onto his lawn, and that Christmas Eve he was truly on his own, though he didn’t know much about it, shitfaced, on his back, under the stars, in Odessa, Texas.

A
T THE PARTY, GEORGE BUSH
held a tall Perrier. He hadn’t been drunk for almost forty years: one martini, maybe two, for Christmas. Still, you’d have to say he had a rosy glow, mostly from his bright red blazer. He wore it to all his Christmas parties, then stuck it in the closet for another year. You wouldn’t catch him wearing anything like that any other time ... but the holidays were special, for friends, family ... didn’t matter what else was going on.

George Bush was serious about spreading cheer. He had to make sure to take care of everyone. That’s why he had eleven parties that Christmas. Most were minestrone guest lists: any Bush family in the region, of course; a few friends from the White House, maybe a handful from Cabinet departments, notably Commerce, where Bush got a lot of jobs for friends; some friends or friends-to-be from the press (off the record); some fellows from Congress, friends from embassies, from the CIA, the Pentagon, politics ... and, Hey! Bring the wife! ... Bush worked over the lists himself, always threw in a few surprises. A couple of parties were just for staff, of course, and two for the Secret Service, their wives and kids. In fact, the Secret Service was the reason Bush stayed in D.C. for Christmas. He wanted to let the agents stay home with their families.

Anyway, you couldn’t miss him at the party, leaning against the door jamb of the big entry hall of the Residence, watching as the Air Force Choir sang carols ... smiling and saying thanks all night, while the friends came up and shook his hand, wished him merry, then posed for their pictures with him. He posed perhaps a hundred times each party, over and over, in front of the mantel on the first floor, or before the big Christmas tree in the dining room, where the Filipino stewards manned the buffet of roast beef, ham, shrimp, salads, fruits, fruitcake, Christmas cookies, eggnog. ... Of course, there was a gift, too. This year, it was a porcelain model of the VP Residence. Must have given away hundreds of those. But the photo gave each friend something to remember, something to put on the wall. And Bush always had something to say, a funny moment to recall, a teasing needle, through his smile, as the cameraman clicked away. The VP thus bestowed his highest gift, his company, a personal moment with him, the currency that had paid his freight all the way from County Chairman. The photo was remembrance of that moment in the glow. Being with George, as his sister said one Christmas, was like feeling the sun on your back.

“You know, if every voter could just
meet
him ...”

“He’d be President already. I know.”

The guests nodded murmurous agreement as they watched him, fondly, across the room, enjoying his friends, spreading the glow.

“If he could just show himself ...”

“Like he
is
...”

“I know.”

Some went so far as to tell him, as if to make him
understand,
as if he could somehow unlock it in a speech, or on TV someday. “You just have to let people see you ...”

“Just go out there and
be yourself
!”

Bush always countered with his old one-liner, the punchline to a joke he’d heard years back: “Yeah, they told me, just be yourself ... so I did. Maybe that was the problem.”

But now with Iranamok around his ankles, with Dole climbing past him in Iowa, with his polls at an all-time low, some friends wouldn’t be put off with a joke. One of the oldest friends, FitzGerald Bemiss—an usher at George’s wedding, known him forever, since boyhood summers in Maine—tried to sit Bush down for a serious talk: George
had
to define himself, to show the people
who he was
!

And Bush unloaded on him, blew up! Set poor Gerry back on his heels. Bush wasn’t going to cut and run from Reagan! He wasn’t going to duck out on his friend now!

Of course, that wasn’t what Bemiss meant. But Bush couldn’t see the difference between
showing himself
and
showing up a friend
. And that was just out of the question. George Bush would never lose a friend.

That was the reason for the Christmas cards, at least at the start: a way for George and Bar to keep beaming the glow to the folks they’d left back East, when they moved to Texas. But the way those two were about friends, the list just kept growing. Every year George Bush was alive on the planet, there were more friends to take care of. And the way Bar kept her file cards, no one ever dropped off the list. Bar moved her box of file cards from Midland to Houston, to Washington, back to Houston, to New York, back to Washington, to China, back to Washington, then back to Houston, and to Washington again. Of course, every year it grew, from family and schoolmates, to oil-business friends and new Texas neighbors, and Texas pols, to Washington friends and neighbors, fellow Congressmen, then UN Ambassadors from all over the world, and then local pols from all over the country, and more new neighbors, and Chinese officials, and CIA colleagues and foreign intelligence pooh-bahs, and more pols, now from all fifty states and a few from the U.S. territories, and campaign contributors, and volunteers, and staff, and ex-staff, and that wounded soldier he met at the VA, and that lady who told him
such a sad story
at the shopping center in Waco, and the cop who used to stop traffic every afternoon, as George Bush nosed his car out of the Houston Club garage. Some of the older entries were written over a dozen times for that friend’s successive new houses, amended for that family’s every new child, and when a child moved away from home, that child got a new file card. By the mid-seventies, say, while the Bushes sojourned in China, Bar had four or five thousand file cards, all updated by year-round effort, stored in a gleaming wooden four-drawer case that held pride of place, like the Roman gods of the household, in the upstairs family room of the residence of the U.S. compound in Peking. Bar used to point it out to guests, as one might mention a family heirloom. One visitor who saw it protested:

“Some of those must be just political friends.”

And Bar’s eyes turned icy as she snapped: “What’s the difference? A friend is a friend.”

It wasn’t till 1979, in the first George Bush for President campaign, that staff intruded in any way upon Bar’s Christmas card suzerainty. The friend list was growing geometrically as George flew around the country, and Bar was busy campaigning, too. So a group of volunteer ladies in Houston took over. Of course, Bar came by, every chance she got, to see that the cards were done right, addressed by hand with blue felt-tip pens, to give them a soft, kitchen-table look; and the cards for the closest friends pulled out of the bulk mailing and brought to the house for a scrawled P.S. and signature from George Bush.

Two years later, when the campaign was over and, in Bar’s phrase, “we became Vice President,” there was a VP Christmas card budget from the Republican National Committee, and a Houston Branch Office of the Vice President to do the heavy lifting. To be sure, the friend list was bigger now, embracing all U.S. Ambassadors overseas, and foreign dignitaries, and all members of Congress, and Governors, Republican Committeemen, campaign contributors, County Chairmen, and like stars in the new George Bush cosmology. By 1983, the ladies in Houston had the list cross-indexed on an IBM database. And a gentle, white-haired woman named Dot Burghard (a bit hard of hearing of late, but still possessed of
beautiful
penmanship) sat at a desk in the workroom of the Houston OVP, attending to the friend-list updates and then addressing envelopes, every day, beginning each year in May. By December, of course, it wasn’t just Dot, but a whole roomful of volunteers, bent to the three S’s (stuff, seal, and stamp) at the long table in the workroom, amid a murmur of old Bush-stories, and occasional shouted queries to Dot, and Betty Baker’s Texas trail-boss voice, on the phone, trying to rustle up more volunteers: “Hah, Suzie! Did Santa Claus visit yet? ... Oh, well, tellya how ta assure it. Come on down here and give us a hand. ... Well, we’re doin’ all
right,
but we could always use s’more ... Gloria! What’re we up to—the H’s? ... Fact, I’m a little worried ’bout gettin’ ’em
out
!”

And even after the bulk mailings, there were response cards to fire out, to people who were not on the friend list but who sent George Bush a card that year. And then, of course, returns started boomeranging in—someone moved, or dead, or God knows what—so the ladies had to peel back the stamp to read the code to find out which substratum of the friend list it came from: the Ambassadors, or contributors, or the 1944 crew of the USS
Finback
... or, in the worst case, it might be a card with the “CC” code hidden under the stamp, which meant “Christmas Card,” and which meant the name was from the
crème de la crème
, the Original Barbara Bush Christmas Card List. And that person had better be found. That card HAD to get out. It was often February and sometimes March before all the returns were investigated and rectified. Better late than never: people saved those cards, after all, and watched the kids (now the grandkids) grow up in the annual family pictures. This year, 1986, with new friends for the new campaign, it was bound to be March before it ended. They could almost count on that. This year—in fact, on the night of this party—there were thirty thousand George Bush Christmas cards in the mail.