What It Takes (83 page)

Tell the truth, Bush wasn’t much for programs, one way or the other. It wasn’t that he wanted to do anything ... except a good job. He wanted to
be
a Senator. ... Just about the time he was thinking it over, about to announce his big move, there were stories in the paper—front page, it was awful!—about this little girl in the Houston public housing, sleeping on the floor, who’d got bitten by a rat! God, what a shame! ... Bush didn’t think about a program for housing, or maybe calling that Councilman he helped to elect—propose a rat eradication plan! No, he called home, that afternoon:

“Bar? ... You think we could give that family our baby bed?”

And they did. That very evening, George came home, packed up that bed, and took it right over.

That’s
why Bush was gonna win the election: concern for the common man. Common values ... common decency. That’s what people had to know about him ... that, and the fact—Bush could
see
it, everywhere—the Democrats were out of touch. They’d held on to Texas since the Civil War! They’d lost sight of the common folk ... that was Bush’s secret weapon. The Democrats were split, right down the middle. The incumbent Senator was an old-fashioned liberal, Ralph Yarborough—out of step with the new Texas, George Bush’s Texas. The state was changing—Bush knew it, just as surely as Nixon beat Kennedy in Houston, last time—but old Yarborough hadn’t got the wake-up call. He was still traveling the state in his white suit and big white hat, promising the world. ... Bush
knew
he could take him. Jeez, even Lyndon couldn’t stand Yarborough (Yarborough called Johnson “power mad”). And now that LBJ was Vice President—that had to hurt Yarborough, didn’t it? Johnson would be running with Kennedy again—that was the good news for the Democrats. But people didn’t vote straight ticket anymore ... LBJ on the ballot might even
help
Bush ...
everybody
knew how Lyndon hated Yarborough.

So Bush started talking it up—Senator!—just to friends, at the start. And there were more than a couple who suggested that maybe he ought to go easy, take it slow ... maybe run for office once, you know, something local, or
Congress
... how ’bout Congress first? But Bush didn’t want to hear that. He was going to announce, September ’63. He’d do it with a splash! He knew where he belonged—in the U.S. Senate. Jeez, almost a year now, and his father
still
regretted leaving the Senate.

Oh, God—Dad! ... Big Pres could be a problem!

Prescott Bush was not a Goldwater man. In fact, he was just the kind of fellow that the eastern wing was counting on to get behind
someone decent
... like Rockefeller, or Lodge—or Bill Scranton ... someone to stop that
nut
, Goldwater. In fact, just a year or so after retirement, Pres would have liked nothing better than to keep his hand in, at least in Connecticut.

But George called, asked him flat-out: Don’t do it! It was bad enough, they were talking in the churches of Pasadena about Bush’s father, the Senator, a
member
of the Council on Foreign Relations! If he came out against Goldwater ...

And so, Pres had to swallow it down, for his son. The torch had passed ... to young George. It was his turn. Prescott Bush sat on his hands in ’64. The whole campaign through, he could barely say a word. He confirmed and completed his sad political exile.

And in Texas, George Bush started campaigning in earnest. He’d have to have men in the field—area chairmen! It was time to make his move—so he called a meeting ... and, as his first appointment, he turned to that slimeball Bircher, Gene Crossman, and appointed
him
to head up East Texas.

Well, that was too much for the ladies. One of the veterans, Linda Dyson, heard about Crossman, and she marched up the stairs of HQ, right to the front bedroom, George’s office ... where she flung open the door, and shouted in Bush’s frozen face:

“George Bush! Y’know what your problem is? ... You don’t know the difference between a common man and a
common
common man.”

But he knew how to make a man feel special—and that’s what he did, all over the state. Bush had a four-man primary, and one of his opponents was Jack Cox, another young comer, a hot stump speaker who’d already run for Governor (and gave John Connally a run for his money).

Bush—well, he wasn’t much on the stump. He’d get cranked up, dive into a twisty river of a sentence, no noun, a couple or three verbs in a row, and you wouldn’t know where he was headed—sometimes for minutes at a stretch, while his hands sawed and pulled at the air, smacked on the podium, drew imaginary lines and boxes without name, without apparent reference to what he was talking about, which you couldn’t exactly tie down, unless you caught a key word, now and then, like “Sukarno,” or “taxes,” or “lib-rull” (that one came up a lot), although you could tell it really hacked him off, the way his voice rose through the octaves—until he emerged on the other side of the Gulf of Mexico, red in the face, pleased as hell with himself, spluttering out the predicate, or maybe the direct object of that second-last verb, and a couple more random words that had occurred to him in the meantime, and you could see he cared, and it all went together in his mind, but it wasn’t clear exactly how, or what it was he thought was so damned
important
.

Fortunately, there weren’t many speeches required in the primary, which was a meet-the-folks affair in most Texas towns, where you could still get the registered Republicans into a single room. He did covered-dish dinners, cocktail parties, barbecues ... and he was beautiful. He’d talk to everybody one-on-one, and they loved him. He was so eager to know about them! And he already had Party-official friends, after his year as chairman; and he knew all the oilmen, and a lot of fellows in business; and old neighbors, guys who’d drifted down from Yale ... no one ever slipped off his screen. And after every dinner, every barbecue or picnic, Bush’d get back on his plane, and ask his area chairman: “Who’re the ten people I wanna thank in Pecos?” And he’d do those ten notes before he was halfway home. Back in Houston, he’d do a few dozen more, banging them out on his own machine, with typos and x-outs and other endearing steno foibles, all explained in the top-right corner of the note, where he’d put: “Self-typed by GB.”

Well, it worked like a charm. As did the Bush Bandwagon, a busful of friends dropped off in some neighborhood, working door-to-door from lists the volunteers had prepared ... and not just in River Oaks or Tanglewood, but anywhere there were Republicans. They’d work in couples—safer that way—and Bar’d go with George’s friend, a sweet-natured insurance man named Jack Steel. Jack was a bit older, and Bar already had her white hair, and everybody thought she must be Jack’s wife—they used to laugh about that. They laughed about so many things: one man came to the door in his underpants; one woman hawked up a big gob, spat it into the flowerpot; once, the bus lost Bar and Jack, and they sat on a curb under a streetlight till ten o’clock ... but she loved it. She became a campaigner. It wasn’t politics with her—it was just for George. Her attitude was simple: it was anything he wanted to do.

Sometimes, they’d load up the bus and carry the whole show hundreds of miles across the state. They’d carry along a cowboy band, the Black Mountain Boys, who’d draw a crowd that Bush would ply with lemonade ... and they’d dress up the gals in red, white, and blue, with white skimmer hats that said
BUSH BELLES
on the bands, and sashes with painted bluebonnets, that read
BLUEBONNET BELLES FOR BUSH.
Bar made purses for all the Bush Belles with a needlepoint elephant, and
BUSH
in big white letters. She must have made a hundred—the steady volunteers got handbags, too.

It was mostly volunteers in the big Houston office, an abandoned ballet school in an old loft on Main Street. The place was grungy, but the mirrors on the long walls made it look like there were hundreds of workers. And you couldn’t beat the rent ... or the maintenance: whenever anything broke down—plumbing, air conditioning ... happened all the time—instructions were to call George’s friend Bake. His daddy owned the building. Bake was a local lawyer—husband of a Bush Belle—James A. Baker III. Aleene Smith came over from the Party office, to keep the operation in line. (Anyway, she couldn’t have stayed with the Party: when George resigned as County Chairman, the Birchers took over ... Kernel Napalm at the helm ... their first act was to throw out every scrap of paper that mentioned George, or Bush for Senate.)

Houston was the biggest operation in the state. (C. Fred Chambers worked from Houston: he was Finance Chairman. The Bush family worked from Houston, too: George W.—Junior—seventeen that year, poured his heart into that campaign, all summer.) But Bush also set up a statewide office in the capital, Austin. He wouldn’t concede any bit of the state—not the Negro wards of Houston, or Dallas; not even the machine-Democrat Mexican shantytowns of the Rio Grande Valley—why shouldn’t the GOP get Latin votes? Why couldn’t Bush have friends there, too? ... In Midland, heart of the oil patch, it seemed the whole town was out for Bush. Two weeks after his announcement, they scheduled a rally, strung a huge
BUSH
banner right across Wall Street; thirty oil wives and daughters dressed as Bush Belles; they rented the auditorium at San Jacinto Junior High—packed the place! A thousand people came ... in Midland! George’s local chairman, Martin Allday, an old friend, an oil and gas lawyer, did the introducing that night:

“Ladies and gentlemen ... the only man I have personally known, who I thought should one day be President ...”

But Bush was a long way from President—even Senator. There were 254 counties in Texas (in an area wider than New York to Chicago; longer than Chicago to Birmingham), and 200 of them never had a real Republican organization. Bush probably worked through half himself, and he had an amazing personal grasp of his affairs: by June ’64, when he’d won a plurality in the primary, and beat Jack Cox head to head in a run-off (cleaned his clock: won better than sixty percent!); by the time Martin Allday left his law practice in Midland and moved to Austin to take over campaign management, Bush could run through the state, without any notes, county by county, knew the names of major supporters in each. Problem was, the list wasn’t long enough. And by that time, Kennedy was dead, LBJ was President—he’d clobber Goldwater in Texas ... and his name at the top of the ticket would pull thousands of extra Democrats to the polls, to give their favorite son his own full term in the White House.

Still, Bush was sure he could pull it off. He could feel things changing, everywhere he went. Bush for a Greater Texas! ... Bush for a Greater America! ... George Bush was the youth, the future: his brochures showed a bold young man charging into a crowd, his suitcoat slung over one shoulder ... it was the style of “vigor,” the style of a Kennedy. And he was sure he knew the people—he made
thousands
of new friends, he could
feel it
... they
liked
him! If he could just hang the lib-rull label on Yarborough ... if he could just show the people that old phony was a
giveaway artist
... if he could just attack hard enough, long enough. ... That was George’s method, from the start. That’s what state Party leaders had
told him to do
: attack, and keep attacking.

Alas, he was not that good on attack. It never seemed natural with him, no matter how many times he did it. The general election was all stump speeches, six to eight a day, with plane or bus trips in between. After weeks of this, Bush had a standard speech: Sukarno, the UN, foreign aid, taxes, the oil industry ... but it never added up to a picture of Bush, or any kind of message—except Yarborough was too lib-rull. When he’d get onto Yarborough, Bush’s voice would start to climb, his hands would leap up and slash the air—you couldn’t tell where the hell he was going, except in a general drift to the right. And the farther right he drifted, the more frantic he became: Bush always screamed and sawed the air harder when he had to convince himself that he believed. ...

Yarborough was
un-Texan
! ...
left wing
! ...
selling our state down the river
! ... Bush opposed the new Civil Rights Act and lambasted Yarborough for voting to choke off a filibuster on it ... Bush said America ought to get the hell out of the UN, if that organization seated the Red Chinese ... Congress ought to cut off foreign aid if those foreign commie-leaning tinhorns didn’t wanna play ball... the U.S. ought to arm the Cuban exiles ... and get
tough
in Vietnam (including use of nuclear weapons—if that’s what the military called for).

But the harder he screamed, the more he played into Yarborough’s hands. LBJ was demolishing Goldwater by painting him as a right-wing extremist, a warmonger, a mad bomber ... so Yarborough hopped on board: George Bush, Yarborough said, was so extreme, so far out in right field ... (What’s that my opponent wants?
The H-bomb
? ...
in Vitt-namm
?) ... Why, no wonder that boy was ... the darling of the
Birchers
!

The Birchers! George’s friends couldn’t believe it! You couldn’t get those right-wing nuts to
say
the name Bush ... without spitting. But how could you explain that to everyone in Pecos, or Waco, Brownsville, Texarkana? ... How could you convince anybody, with George Bush out there, screaming himself hoarse?

Martin Allday, the new Campaign Manager, had a long talk with George one night, after hearing that stump speech. Maybe Bush should just, you know, try to be more like himself. ... No, Bush said. He was doing what he had to. He had to attack, if he wanted to win ... and he could win! He knew he was getting to Yarborough now, with those wild charges the Senator made. And Yarborough refused to debate him. “We got him on the run!” George said. He’d heard old Yarborough speak at a picnic—it was
scandalous
! The man just promised anything he could think of! That’s why it was so important, Bush said. We need honest people in government. Honest people, together, can do good things for the country.