The Family (29 page)

George ridiculed Yarborough for voting for medical care for the aged. He compared the bill to a federal program to air-condition ship holds for apes and baboons, dubbing it “medical air for the caged.”

He blasted Yarborough for supporting such “left-wing federal spending programs” as the Rural Electrification Administration. Yarborough scoffed that George “wouldn’t know a cotton boll from a corn shuck” and was “plumb dumb” to level “so un-Texan a blow at the farmers and ranchers of Texas” by suggesting the elimination of the REA.

George derided Yarborough’s support for the War on Poverty with a reference to the “sun tan” project of the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps, which George said had failed miserably, although the CCC had built many parks and kept youths from running the streets jobless during the height of the Depression.

“Bush wanted to keep the jam up top,” said Alex Dickie Jr., “whereas Yarborough wanted to put the jam on the bottom shelf for the little people.” The senator supported federal aid to education, medical care for the aged, social justice, rights of working men and women, conservation, farm supports, rural electrification, and community development, all of which George opposed.

Having twisted to the far right of his father, George, as head of the Harris County GOP, had portrayed himself as a conservative who could get along with John Birchers on an individual basis. He said that the Republican Party should not be a refuge for segregationists, and yet his effort to bring Negroes into the party was to start a separate GOP organization for them. His good friend Lud Ashley, a Democrat, wrote to him in 1964: “You’re so much better than Goldwater, Tower and that wing of the party, both ideologically and as an intelligent human being that there’s just no contest.”

Despite Ashley’s personal endorsement, there is nothing to show that George Bush was better than what he was espousing. Winning was everything to him. “I like to win,” he told the Associated Press. “Like to succeed. I feel goaded on by competition.”

He later expressed regret at running so far to the right in 1964, yet he ran against civil rights again in 1966 in his first congressional race, and when he did vote for open housing in 1968, he seemed to do so in spite of himself—because black GIs expected it, not because it was the right thing to do. Having supported two Eisenhower campaigns (1952 and 1956) and Nixon’s effort in 1960, George clearly planned to stay a Republican, but during 1964 he did not advertise the fact.

Yarborough taunted him for launching a $2 million campaign and littering the landscape with billboards of himself that barely mentioned the word “Republican.” George countered with allegations that the senator had accepted fifty thousand dollars in a brown paper bag from the Texas fertilizer king Billie Sol Estes, who was in prison for mail fraud and conspiracy.

At rallies Yarborough read from Bush’s campaign material showing that Zapata Offshore drilled for oil in Kuwait, the Persian Gulf, Borneo, and Trinidad. “Every producing oil well drilled in foreign countries by American companies means more cheap foreign oil in American ports, fewer acres of Texas land under oil and gas lease, less income to Texas farmers and ranchers,” said Yarborough. “The issue is clear-cut in this campaign—a Democratic senator who is fighting for the life of the free enterprise system as exemplified by the independent oil and gas producers in Texas, and a Republican candidate who is the contractual driller for the international oil cartel.”

In the oil fields of East Texas, “Smilin’ Raff,” as Yarborough was known, asked crowds if they were ready to vote “for a carpetbagger from Connecticut who is drilling oil for the Sheikh of Kuwait.”

Slipping in the polls every week, Yarborough kept on slugging. “Let’s show the world that old Senator Bush can’t send Little Georgie down here to buy a Senate seat,” he told his supporters. He zinged the pretty boy’s “big ole Daddy” as “out to buy hisself a seat in the United States Senate” so many times that Prescott Bush finally responded with a letter: “George Bush’s Daddy did not
send
him to Texas. He chose to go 16 years ago and we have been very proud and happy that Texans have taken him to their hearts.”

From afar Prescott enjoyed the rough-and-tumble of his son’s campaign and did whatever he could to help him. But the father’s style was as different from the son’s as were their politics. Somehow Prescott had managed to transcend the limits of his conservative background when he ran for office, whereas George seemed to have regressed. His 1964 campaign was opposed to everything his father represented: civil rights, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, open housing, Medicare. George called Medicare “socialized medicine” and Martin Luther King Jr. “a militant.”

“George Bush is certainly not his father’s image in my view,” said Charles Sargent Caldwell, a staff assistant of Yarborough from 1957 to 1970. “I can recall Prescott Bush being in the Senate of the United States. He was there when I was there, and I recall him as among that vanishing breed of progressive-minded Republicans . . . George Bush . . . is much more conservative. He was affected by his move to Texas . . . There was no doubt about the fact that if you were going to enter the GOP and become active in it in a place like Odessa or Midland, you were dealing with a bunch of folks who were really very, very conservative . . . you could be considered a moderate in Midland, Texas, and you would still be to the right of virtually anybody running for office in Massachusetts . . . That’s just the kind of country [it] was.”

In Texas, George had landed on a planet that could not support life as a progressive Republican. So he acclimated himself (some say too easily) to the conservative redneck terrain. At the time Senator Goldwater advocated using “small tactical nuclear weapons” to defoliate the jungles in South Vietnam, George also proclaimed his support for restricted use of nuclear weapons, if “militarily prudent.” He then bashed Yarborough for supporting the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

“Lawd almighty,” exclaimed Yarborough. “Bush doesn’t believe in clean air, doesn’t believe in keeping out all the strontium 90 and all the chemicals that pollute the atmosphere, that create cancer in babies, create leukemia, make sterile men and women.”

Immediately George’s finance manager, Martin Allday, suggested he counterpunch with the story of Robin’s leukemia. “I said, ‘George, you can turn this to your advantage.’” But George, according to Allday, said the family tragedy was out of bounds.

Perhaps this rare example of restraint accounted for George’s assessment of himself during that campaign. In his 1987 autobiography,
Looking Forward
, he wrote: “Just as people listening to a candidate running his first race learn something about the candidate, the candidate learns something about himself. I found out that jugular politics—going for the opposition’s throat—wasn’t my style.”

By then he had obviously forgotten his conversation a few weeks after the 1964 campaign with John Stevens, his Episcopal minister in Houston. Stevens recalled George’s saying, “You know, John, I took some of the far right positions to get elected. I hope I never do it again. I regret it.”

Yet jugular politics would be repeated so often in future campaigns that it became a pattern. George would always repent after caving in to his baser instincts, or what Yarborough called his “meanness to little people.” George’s need to win was so great that he would do whatever was necessary to get elected while at the same time hiding behind a carefully crafted image of niceness. Throughout the 1964 campaign he distributed pictures of himself surrounded by his wife, his dog, and all of his children. He used his son Georgie, eighteen, to tape a thirty-second TV spot in Spanish to appeal to Mexican Americans in the Rio Grande.

During that summer, young George worked in his father’s campaign, looking up phone numbers, delivering signs, and compiling briefing books on all the counties in Texas. Before he left for college in September, he drove the Bush Bandwagon Bus for a whistle-stop tour of fifty cities, including the tiny towns of Paris, Honey Grove, Bells, Electra, Henrietta, Quanah, Tahoka, Dimmitt, Big Spring, Snyder, Floydada, O’Donnell, Lamesa, Odessa, and Midland.

At every stop, young George jumped off the bus with his parents and scooted around town to draw a crowd for his father.

“I remember him well,” said Don Dangerfield, a retired fireman in Odessa, then an activist against racial segregation. “That boy knew he was going places, touring the white side of town like there was never going to be any doubt about it, just because of who he was.”

Big George spoke on courthouse squares, in parks, at receptions, barbecues, ice-cream socials, picnics, livestock auctions, factory workers’ lunch hours, and “come to Jesus” meetings. The Bush Bluebonnets, a group of pretty young women who wore big blue hats while they distributed Bush buttons and brochures, and the Black Mountain Boys, whom George introduced at every stop as “four Church of Christ lads from Abilene,” accompanied George and Barbara on the bus trip. The “lads,” an old-fashioned term George had picked up from his father, sang their cowboy rendition of “The sun’s gonna shine in the Senate some day, George Bush is gonna chase them liberals away.” Huge, happy, clapping, stomping crowds at every stop convinced the Bushes of certain victory.

Barry Goldwater made two appearances in the state with George, as did Richard Nixon, again to stupendous crowds. Particularly buoyed by Nixon’s visit, George wrote to thank him:

It helped immeasurably. 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. Your visit was great and all of us here appreciate it. It was a terrific help in fund raising.

“We’re going to win,” George told his supporters in the middle of October. “I can feel it. I can just feel it.” Yarborough had slipped so far in the polls that
The Houston Chronicle
headlined the front page with the news: “Yarborough, Bush Even.”
Newsweek
predicted victory: “Insiders like Bush in a squeaker.” Even the
Yale Daily News
weighed in: “George Bush is young, energetic, and very conservative, and a victory over liberal incumbent Ralph Yarborough would make him a power in the GOP. And a victory is quite likely.” The Democrats in Harris County were so worried they fired off a telegram to the President in the White House:

IN VIEW OF THE UNBELIEVABLE NUMBER OF DEMOCRATS WHO ARE CONSIDERING VOTING FOR GEORGE BUSH WE CONSIDER IT IMPERATIVE THAT YOU MAKE AN APPEARANCE IN HOUSTON BETWEEN NOW AND ELECTION DAY TO SUPPORT THE CANDIDACY OF OUR GOOD DEMOCRATIC SENATOR RALPH YARBOROUGH

The President flew to Texas to campaign for Yarborough, but by Election Day the Bush team had become so certain of victory that they changed their party site from the campaign headquarters to the largest hotel ballroom in Houston simply to accommodate the crush of well-wishers who wanted to celebrate George’s win. Prescott and Dorothy flew in from Connecticut with their son Jonathan. Young George flew home from his freshman year at Yale to be with his family for the grand occasion. The ballroom of the Hotel America had been stuffed with balloons for the celebration.

“At 7:01 p.m. as we were pulling into the parking lot of the hotel for our victory party, the radio announcer cancelled it,” recalled young George. “‘In the race for U.S. Senate in Texas, Senator Ralph Yarborough has defeated George Bush.’”

Dejectedly, young George assumed the job of posting the election returns for the growing crowds. By 9:00 p.m., it was painfully obvious to everyone that President Johnson had won the greatest landslide victory in thirty years of American politics. He swept forty-four states and the District of Columbia, practically drowning Goldwater, who conceded before midnight. The Johnson tidal wave also swept Ralph Yarborough into office with 1,463,958 votes to 1,134,337 votes for George Bush.

Standing in the hotel ballroom, George was thunderstruck by his loss. He circled the room, shaking hands and thanking volunteers for their hard work. He smiled gamely and tried to hold back his tears as he conceded defeat and congratulated his opponent. “He beat me fair and square,” he said, his voice trembling. “I have been trying to think whom we could blame for this and regretfully conclude that the only one I can blame is myself.” Toward the end of the evening, campaign workers spotted young George W. in tears.

Later his stunned father met with reporters. “I just don’t know how it happened,” said George. “I don’t understand it. I guess I have a lot to learn about politics . . . The straight party lever hurt me and with a Texan on the ballot that hurt me. I understand we were beaten very badly in minority precincts but . . .”

Yarborough was jubilant, especially when President Johnson dropped by his headquarters to offer congratulations. The President addressed campaign workers: “Thank you for not handicapping us for another six years with another Republican senator.”

The senator later described the campaign as “one of the vilest in history.” He said he knew his vote for the civil rights bill might have cost him votes. “I knew that only 38 percent of the people of Texas approved it and that was risky. I voted for the long-range best interest of Texas. I wouldn’t be true to myself if I didn’t.” He received 98.5 percent of the state’s black vote in 1964, the first year there was no poll tax—which greatly hindered poor voters, that is black voters, from voting—in federal elections in Texas. He then tore in to his opponent and said George Bush “ought to pack up his baggage and go back where he came from.”

At that point,
The Houston Post
, which had made no endorsement in the race, suddenly made up its mind. In an editorial titled “Snide Statement,” the paper wrote:

We found it difficult to decide before the election whether Sen. Ralph Yarborough or Houston’s George Bush would make the better senator. However, Yarborough made it easy for us—and others—to decide who looked better after the election.