Chapter 4

JUMPING INTO POLITICS

“That’s one that his mother taught him: never gloat when you win. When you don’t gloat when you win, you don’t tend to pout when you lose. There’s a fine balance in life and he found that balance.”

—Alan Simpson

My earliest memory of my father goes back to when I was five years old, in 1964. After serving as Harris County Republican Party chairman, he was running for the U.S. Senate from Texas against the incumbent, Senator Ralph Yarborough. Yarborough was a legend in Texas, out of the liberal wing of the Texas Democrats. There had been a split among the state Democrats in those days—in fact, President John F. Kennedy had gone down to Dallas to try to patch things up on that fateful day in November 1963. Yarborough was there in Dallas for the president’s visit, and many believe that his ongoing feud with right-wing Democrats led to Yarborough sitting in the second car, rather than up front with the president in the first car. Conservative Governor John Connally was in the president’s car, and he, too, was shot that day but survived.

Yarborough had been elected the junior senator from Texas in 1957, joining Lyndon B. Johnson, who was the senior senator. Smilin’ Ralph, as everyone in Texas called him, had a reputation for aligning himself with the national party rather than with his colleagues from Texas. As a Republican, my father saw an opening as Yarborough continued to distance himself from the moderate-to-conservative state Democratic Party. Of course, I don’t remember this firsthand; I only learned about it as an adult. All I knew at the time was that Dad was running for Senate.

I do remember my parents being very busy and there always being a lot of people in and out of our house. There seemed to be a lot of hustle and bustle, things moving very quickly from a small child’s point of view. I also remember photographs being taken of us children with a baby elephant—a live baby elephant and we were sitting on it! As a five-year-old girl, getting to ride on top of a baby elephant was like living a dream. I didn’t even know what the Republican Party was, much less that the elephant was a symbol of the GOP and a donkey the Democrats.

At one point that fall, my brother Marvin remembers seeing Dad’s smiling face on a billboard. He felt proud, confused, a little intimidated—and for the first time realized that maybe “our lives might be different from the other kids in school.”

Marvin also remembers walking into our house on Briar Drive in Houston in 1964 and seeing “bodies all over the place.” Of course, he meant live bodies—campaign volunteers making posters in just about every room. There was a core group that came over to the house pretty regularly to work on the campaign, usually on weekends, drawn by Dad’s charisma as well as the free burgers and hot dogs my parents supplied.

The Black Mountain Valley Boys out of Abilene, Texas, usually joined Dad on the bus during that campaign. They would go into small towns, set up on their flatbed truck, and play music. Then Dad would get off the bus and make speeches to whoever had gathered.

In the end, my father lost the election. My brother George, who was eighteen at the time, was driving to the “victory” party when he heard on the radio that Dad had lost. He remembers feeling devastated. It’s something that every political family must learn to cope with—the disappointments that go with the territory.

For his part, my dad was disappointed but remained optimistic. He told us all we’d win the next time around.

I could sense the tension, and I remember all the unhappy faces. As a five-year-old, I couldn’t possibly understand that he made quite a credible showing given that Lyndon Johnson was the 1964 Democratic presidential nominee running against Republican Barry Goldwater, in the aftermath of President Kennedy’s assassination. Having Johnson at the top of the ticket certainly didn’t hurt the Texas Democrats, nor did the fact that Johnson was the heavy favorite. Dad, as a relative newcomer, could be proud of how well he had done.

A week after the election, Dad wrote to Richard Nixon, who had been the losing Republican candidate for president in 1960 against John Kennedy. Nixon had campaigned for Dad and then returned to his New York law firm, when Dad wrote to him: “We got whipped, and whipped soundly, but out of the gloom on November 3 there are some bright spots.” He pointed out the magnitude of the Johnson landslide, and its long coattails in Texas. Johnson beat Goldwater by some 700,000 votes, but Yarborough beat Dad by only 300,000. The Bush campaign, moreover, polled over 1.1 million votes, the most any Republican in Texas had ever gotten until then. He thanked Nixon for his campaign visit, adding, “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.”

As much as Dad loved running for office, the people he had met in Texas were even more important to him. Here’s a letter I recently received from Bessie Liedtke, the wife of one of Dad’s business partners at Zapata, describing what happened on election night:

This is from my heart. My mother and I were very, very close. She died the very day George H. W. Bush lost the senatorial election to Ralph Yarborough. He took the time to call and console me about my mother, and this was a time when he had to be very disappointed about his own loss. He probably does not remember doing this, but this speaks volumes to me about the kind of man he is and I shall never forget it.

Dad returned to Zapata after the election, and in September of the following year, 1965, Hurricane Betsy barreled into the Gulf of Mexico. The oil industry sustained over $100 million in damages from the storm, $5.7 million of which was due to the loss of a highly successful Zapata offshore drilling barge called Maverick. While three other Zapata rigs survived the storm, Maverick vanished in the hurricane without a trace. This was very upsetting news to Dad, because Maverick’s disappearance meant the loss of a major drilling contract, as well as plans for a proposed merger.

Taylor Blanton, a longtime friend of our family, expanded on Dad’s recollections of that storm and remembered visiting with Mom when Dad returned from looking for the rig. “I remember him saying it was impossible for this rig to have just disappeared completely, but they had flown back and forth over the area until they were sure it was not there, and had just disappeared underwater. No shouting, no cursing, no anger—just dejection and sadness at losing something so vital to Zapata and to his business future,” Taylor told me.

Taylor became a fixture at our house during his college years, and he remembers Jeb, Neil, and Marvin skinny-dipping on hot summer nights in our pool in Houston. “When your parents wanted them to get out and go to bed, your dad would yell, ‘Here come the Vanderhof girls!’ and the boys would grab towels and run inside” to avoid being seen by the neighborhood girls.

Taylor also remembers how Dad and Mom performed many kindnesses behind the scenes, ones that few people know about to this day: When a friend lost her life savings in a scam, they gave her money to replenish her lost nest egg; when a local businessman’s company began to fail, they gave him financial help; when the vice chairman of the county Republicans suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and began to have financial troubles, Mom and Dad stepped in to help. And when Taylor graduated from college, practically penniless, Mom and Dad surprised him with a VW Beetle. I remember being in the garage when he found the car with a giant card on it, signed by all of us.

After what he calls his “spectacular lack of success” in the 1964 Senate race, Dad decided to run for Congress in 1966 to represent the 7th District. This time, he won against Frank Briscoe.

It was during this race that Don Rhodes reappeared in our lives. Don was working as a night clerk at a convenience store and first began to volunteer in his free time for Dad’s unsuccessful Senate race—he’d do all the “grunt work” that no one else would do, such as going to the post office, posting yard signs, and checking the mailing lists. When Dad lost the 1964 race, Don disappeared. But when Dad announced his second bid, Don came back, this time to be hired full-time. He has remained one of Dad’s most loyal friends and employees.

“He’s been with me ever since, and now he’s part of our family,” Dad says.

It was during these years of campaigning in Texas, when my brothers and I were very young and my parents had to spend hours away from home, that Paula Rendon came into our lives as well. Actually, it was the year I was born, 1959, that my mother answered an ad in the newspaper seeking a sponsor for a woman who wanted to come to the United Sates and work. Paula came from Cuernavaca, Mexico, where her husband had left her with three small children to raise. It took a lot of courage for her to come to America as a single mother and make a life for her family—as well as ours. She remains, like Don, a big part of our family today.

Paula is like a second mother to us. She took over when my mother was busy helping my dad. She fed the five of us, cared for us, and taught us Spanish—all while raising her own family at the same time.

When I was about twelve years old, I was very round, and I couldn’t find any clothes that fit my shape. Paula made some for me.

Today, at age eighty-four, Paula still runs my parents’ household, which, given the amount of friends and family coming and going, is no easy feat. She is a gifted flower arranger and is famous for her pies and jalapeño jelly, but doesn’t give up recipes easily. Paula came to stay with me when Sam was born, and she planted a garden in my yard while the baby was napping. She continues to love my children, as well as my nieces and nephews, the same way she loved us growing up. Paula stands just under five feet tall, and as the children grow, they all see if they can measure up to her—in more ways than one.

At the time of Dad’s 1966 congressional race, I was still quite young—only seven—and again, my memories are more like snapshots in my mind. I remember filming campaign commercials in our backyard and going to St. Martin’s Church in Houston, where our friends congratulated Dad on his win. While there were lots of handshaking and hugs to go around, I was scared and nervous about leaving my home for Washington, D.C.

Dad, two of my brothers, and I went to Washington on our own. My brother George was at Yale, and Jeb stayed at Kinkaid High School in Houston, then switched to the same boarding school Dad and George had attended, Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Mom was still packing up our house in Houston when school started for Neil, Marvin, and me in Washington.

My parents bought a house on Hillbrook Lane in Northwest Washington from Senator Milward Simpson of Wyoming, Senator Alan Simpson’s father. Alan Simpson recalls it being a beautiful home with a hedge in the front yard which Senator Estes Kefauver, Adlai Stevenson’s running mate, drove through one time when he was drunk. Senator Simpson remembers his parents’ real estate settlement, or lack of one: “They sold their home on Hillbrook Lane to George and Barbara on a handshake. The brokers were all irritated, the lawyers were irritated. Everybody was irritated. They said, ‘But you have to have a broker and a lawyer and a real estate agent!’ That was typical Bush and typical Simpson.”

When my brothers and I arrived at the house, Dad told me that he had heard that across the street there was a little girl who was going to be in my same class at National Cathedral School.

One of the things I was most worried about was whether my new classmates were going to wear short socks or long socks. In Texas, we wore short socks, but I had heard that in Washington some girls wore kneesocks. I became fixated on that, as eight-year-old girls might do. Because I was really fretting about the sock situation, my dad went over and introduced me to the neighborhood girl in my class, Olivia Crudgington, who went by “Libby” back then. He first suggested that we be friends, and then he straight out asked her what kinds of socks she and the other girls in class wore.

Some girls might have been embarrassed by this, but my dad had a way about him that endeared him to everyone. I always thought he was the most fun of any of the dads, very charming and loving, and Libby and my other girlfriends thought he was movie-star handsome.

Tragically, a few years later when I was in boarding school and my parents were heading to China, where my dad was to be the U.S. liaison representative, Libby’s father died. Dad wrote her a note, which she told me she has never shared with anyone except her late husband. She has kept the note in her dresser drawer for years, along with a photo of Dad on his boat, which he had enclosed:

Dear Libby,

Here’s a little souvenir (it may seem a little egotistical to send it to you—I hope not).

Anyway, you see, I love you and don’t want you to forget me when I go to China on October 17th.

We are thrilled over the future—wouldn’t it be great if you could come see us someday.

We go see Doro in about eight days—I miss her.

Lib, let’s make a deal—ok? If you ever need help or free advice (it would probably be worth what you paid for it!) from an old man that loves you—count on me—now, in the future, always. You are my very special friend—send us a letter to China some day. Love ya.

GB

“Your father could have been a gas station operator and it would have meant the same to me,” Libby said. “It was an act of pure generosity that meant the world to me then, as it does now.”

Dad was the only adult who wrote Libby a note when her father died.

As for my mother, someone apparently forgot to tell her that a congressman’s term was two years—rather than two months—when we first arrived in Washington. She insisted on dragging us, and any visiting Texans, to every monument, battlefield, and museum she could find within striking distance of our new home that first summer. Marvin laughs, looking back at that time: “I’m not sure whether it was Neil or me who finally broke the news to her that we would rather spend some time with our new friends than climbing the steps of the Washington Monument with visitors from the 7th Congressional District of Texas.”

While Mom was entertaining constituents and keeping the household running smoothly, Dad was getting his sea legs in Congress. True, his own father had been a U.S. senator, but not until Dad had moved to Texas as an adult. He had never really been to Washington much before that, except for an occasional visit to his father’s Senate office.

When my father arrived in Washington in the late 1960s, it was a very busy, hectic time to be a member of Congress. The Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the civil rights movement—so much was going on in our nation.

Because Dad’s schedule was jam-packed, Sundays took on an even greater importance to our family. It was when we went to church and had a Sunday lunch with the whole family and various friends and neighbors. The late congressman Sonny Montgomery, a Democrat from Mississippi, came over regularly. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart and his wife, Andy, lived on our street. Andy was one of Mom’s closest friends, and much to my humiliation, they used to walk the dogs in their bathrobes around the neighborhood. (My children now suffer the same humiliation when I walk our dog in my bathrobe!)

Looking back now, I can see that even in his early political years Dad was more than just a witness to the history that was unfolding. He was an agent for change. For example, on April 10, 1968, Dad voted to pass the very controversial Housing Rights Act of 1968 (aka the “Open Housing Bill”), which was the last of the three great civil rights bills of the 1960s.

Taylor Blanton explained to me, “It’s hard to believe today, but in 1964 ‘equal rights for all’ was not something very often mentioned by candidates in either party in Texas or the South.” The day before the House was to vote on the Housing Rights Act, Martin Luther King Jr. was buried. You can imagine the atmosphere at the time.

According to the House of Representatives Postal Service, Dad received more mail that year than any other member of Congress—and much of it ran heavily opposed to this bill. The volume of mail was so high, in fact, that Dad had to hire extra staff to fold and stuff envelopes, with every staffer working one late night a week on mail duty—including Dad, who stayed late every Wednesday night to help answer angry constituents’ letters.

There were phone calls, too. Allie Page Matthews, who worked for Dad at the time, remembers an African American female staffer, Velma Johnson, who was fielding some of the phone calls. “She was on the phone and tears were coming down her face. He took the telephone out of her hands and said, ‘I don’t know who this is, but this is George Bush and don’t you ever call this office and talk to a member of my staff like that again.’”

A front-page headline in the Houston Chronicle from the time reads “Bush’s Life Threatened over Rights Vote,” referring to another caller who had made a death threat against Dad because of the vote. The Chronicle quoted my father as saying that some of the mail was filled “with hatred and venom. That anyone would resort to this kind of talk makes me ashamed I’m an American.” Dad was adamant that voting for passage was the right thing to do.

On Wednesday, April 17, a week after that historic House vote, Dad flew to Houston to face his constituents who had objected to the bill. When he was introduced to the angry crowd at Memorial High School, he was met with a house full of boos. He wasn’t shaken. He quoted Edmund Burke: “Your representative owes you not only his industry, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serves, you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” He reminded the four hundred people in attendance that their freedom and the principles by which they lived were being defended by “Negroes” (then the politically correct term) in Vietnam. “Somehow it seems fundamental that a man—if he has the money and the good character—should not have a door slammed in his face if he is a Negro or speaks with a Latin American accent. I see a ray of hope, not a handout or a gift, for Negroes locked out by habit and discrimination.” He turned the crowd around, and, the Chronicle reported, Dad “received a standing ovation at the end of his address.”

An interesting aside: President Bill Clinton first became aware of my father in 1966, when he was a senior at Georgetown University and clerking for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “My first impression of him was, he was a Republican who moved to Texas by choice and wound up voting for a civil rights bill—the open housing bill. I didn’t know anything about his district, but I couldn’t help wondering whether it hurt him or not. It really meant a lot to me . . . I grew up in the segregated South, and civil rights was the animating issue of my life when I was a young man. So I thought, now who is this guy who gets elected to Congress in Houston on the Republican ticket and votes for civil rights? I loved it.”

An old friend of Dad’s, Dan Gilcrist, remembers going with Dad to an African American church in Houston a year or so after the housing vote. According to Dan, Dad had a standing invitation to Sunday services whenever he was in the district, because the members of the parish genuinely liked him. So one Sunday morning, he and Dan were sitting in the middle of a large congregation when the preacher introduced Dad and began discussing how much my father had done for the parish. With all this praise, Dad leaned over and quietly asked for Dan’s pen, then made out a check, returned the pen, and waited for the collection plate to be passed.

But then the preacher didn’t stop: he got more and more excited, listing more and more details of Dad’s life, and even began to sweat—and it became clear that this was not just an introduction but an entire homily on Dad. Meanwhile, the parishioners were joining in with a chorus of “amens” and “right ons.” Dan noticed Dad looked more and more uncomfortable. Dan said, “Then George, considering the amount on the check vis-à-vis the homily, leaned over to me and with a pained look on his face, pulled out his checkbook and said, ‘Let me see that pen again.’”

As his stand on that civil rights bill illustrated, my father always took the lead in helping others, not just when it was politically convenient for him. Jimmy Allison, one of Dad’s best friends, who worked for the 1964 Senate campaign and who was campaign manager for the 1966 congressional campaign, lived at our house in Houston for three months. He remembers that before running for Congress, Dad had decided that he should sell his interest in Zapata Off-Shore Drilling Company because it could pose a conflict of interest if he was elected to office. So he made it known that he was interested in selling his share. He found a group ready to buy, and one morning, while sitting in his office, the phone rang. It turned out to be the foreman of one of the offshore rigs telling Dad that the prospective buyers had come for a tour and then made it clear that they were planning on getting rid of some of the employees. After Dad hung up with the foreman, he called the buyers right then and told them that part of the deal meant keeping his old employees on the job. Less than a week later, he sold his stock in Zapata to another company that agreed to those terms—but for far less money.

Jimmy also recalled how Dad struck up a running correspondence with a constituent named Paul Dorsey who was not a supporter of my dad in the 1966 campaign and had written to express his opposition. Dad thought the man’s letters showed him to be a man of intelligence and integrity. So Dad wrote to him over the course of a year and a half, trying to bring him around—which he ultimately did.

Looking through the stack of letters, I found quite a bit of advice to Dad, including: “If you should ever appear on TV with LBJ, don’t look too damn happy about it.” He would also enclose newspaper clippings—dozens sometimes—including one letter to the editor of the Houston Post from Mr. Frank Jungman in which he predicted that the next Texan to be president “will be personable, likable, hardworking George Bush.” Dorsey wrote cynically, “Is this fellow on full or part-time payroll?”

What Dorsey didn’t tell my father was that while he was exchanging letters, he was also dying of cancer. Dad found out. And what my father didn’t tell Dorsey was that he secretly sent money to his hospital to pay the medical bills.

Paul Dorsey never found out.

By early 1968, Dad’s two-year term was nearing its conclusion. Since he was running unopposed, he didn’t have to campaign hard in his district. Instead, he went on the road for the Nixon-Agnew ticket. Nixon had campaigned for Dad when he was running for Congress in 1966 and had gone all around the country speaking on behalf of many other challengers. He made a lot of friends for himself by doing that, since in the fall of ’66, the GOP elected landslide numbers to the House of Representatives. Later on in 1968, Nixon asked Dad and a handful of others to be his surrogate speakers. My father recalled being surprised at the request and found it “rather flattering for a new congressman.”

It was no surprise to some of the people around Dad. Jimmy Allison, then Dad’s administrative assistant in Congress, went to dinner with a young man named Pete Roussel one night. “We were closing the deal for me to come work for Congressman Bush,” Pete remembers. “We had dinner down on Sixth Street in Austin. As we parted, I turned into the night, and as I did, Jimmy called back to me. He said, ‘Pete, stick with George. Someday he’s going to be president.’ And mind you, he was talking at that point about a second-term congressman, a statement which I never forgot.”

Jimmy died in his mid-forties, well before my father became president—but later when Dad became president, he asked Jimmy’s son, Jay, to be his personal aide.

Soon, it was reported that Dad was on Nixon’s short list of vice presidential choices, suggested for the job by President Eisenhower, according to rumors. Nixon strongly considered Dad but ultimately decided that four years in Congress from a safe Texas district didn’t merit a place on the national ticket. Dad felt that was a fair enough assessment. He also started to think about his next run for public office.

At President Nixon’s 1969 inauguration, some people were surprised that Dad went to the airport to see President Johnson off. No one was more surprised than LBJ himself, who did a double take when he spotted my father in the crowd. His widow, Lady Bird Johnson, recalled that day: “Through the years, I have been the recipient of so many generous messages of love, support, and encouragement from George Bush—mostly handwritten! But engraved on my heart is a cold January 20 in 1969 when Lyndon and I said our farewell to Washington and departed for Texas. There in the crowd at Andrews Air Force Base was George Bush . . . George Bush is not only a strong Republican but he is a very warm and caring man who wrote the book on friendship!”

No other Republican officeholder was there. This was a time when most Republicans were at the parade following the Nixon inauguration—after all, their party was taking power for the first time in a decade—but after speaking with his longtime friend and assistant Rose Zamaria, Dad chose to be there to say farewell to a fellow Texan, a man with whom he often disagreed but always respected.

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.