THE VIETNAM WAR PERVADED 1968, lodging itself virulently in the American consciousness. It filtered through TV screens in dour evening newscasts and brayed across newspaper headlines day after day, as protest rallies clamored across college campuses amid growing opposition. It had worn down its chief protagonist, the titanic Lyndon Johnson, who, to the shock of the nation on the last day of March, opted to forgo a reelection bid in an anguished, elusive search for an honorable peace. And it divided the country into camps defined categorically by one’s stance on the war: hawks or doves. But it was particularly pronounced for young men whose lives were subject to the whims of fate predicated by draft numbers, financial means, college acceptance and enrollment, and social and political connections.
While enrolled at Yale, George W. had registered in Houston with Texas Local Board No. 62, but like other college students, was deferred due to “activity in study.” Now with his sheepskin in hand, the question of military service was front and center, just as it was for most male college graduates in 1968. As he wrote in his 1999 autobiography, A Charge to Keep, “We didn’t have the luxury of looking for a job or taking time to consider what to do next. It was hard to get a job until your military status was resolved.” But there was no question that he was going to serve in some capacity. Roland Betts, a friend and DKE fraternity brother, observed that George W. “felt that in order not to derail his father’s political career he had to be in military service of some kind.”
But the war itself was not a cause George W. felt passionate about, not like his father had about serving in World War II when he rejected his own father’s pleas and enlisted in the navy on his eighteenth birthday. In fact, like many, George W. would become disillusioned with war in Vietnam as he realized, increasingly, “we could not explain the mission, had no exit strategy, and did not seem to be fighting to win.”
An elegant alternative to serving in the war was to enlist in the Texas Air National Guard, on call principally to protect Texas’s 367-mile Gulf Coast. His service would allow him to honorably fulfill his military service with little chance of getting shipped off to the war, where in 1968 American troops were dying at a rate of 350 a week. During Christmas break of his senior year, George W. discovered through friends that there were openings in the Guard, learning in a phone call to Colonel Walter “Buck” Staudt, the cigar-chomping commander of the 147th Fighter Group, what he needed to do to apply. When Staudt asked why he wanted to join the Guard, Bush replied, “I want to be a fighter pilot because my father was.”
Dubbed the “Champagne Unit,” the 147th’s ranks during the latter years of the Vietnam War would be rife with the progeny of powerful Texans, including Lloyd Bentsen III, son of a U.S. senator from Texas; John Connally II, the son of the former governor and incumbent treasury secretary for Richard Nixon; and Al Hill Jr., grandson of oil magnate H. L. Hunt. It also included exalted Texans of a different sort: several members of the Dallas Cowboys. Spots in the “Champagne Unit,” as its nickname suggested, were highly coveted and hard to come by. Wait lists were long, and for most, so were the odds of getting admitted. Nonetheless, on May 27, 1968, a dozen days before losing his draft deferment and two weeks before his graduation from Yale, George W. Bush went home to Houston and appeared at the Texas Air National Guard at Ellington Field with the hopes of joining its ranks. Despite scoring a 25 percent on the pilot aptitude test, the minimum acceptable grade, he was sworn in as a second lieutenant the same day. How he got there would become a question of some dispute.
Ben Barnes, the dynamic twenty-nine-year-old Democratic speaker of the Texas House of Representatives at the time, claimed that it was his call to the Guard’s Brigadier General James Rose recommending young George W. Bush for the unit that likely resulted in his ready acceptance. “There is absolutely no way Bush could have gotten into the Texas Air National Guard so quickly unless he had special help,” Barnes said later, estimating that there were as many as two thousand names ahead of Bush’s on the list. His endorsement of George W. came at the request of Sidney Adger, a Houston oilman and well-connected Bush family friend, who asked Barnes if he could pull strings as a favor. As Barnes stated later, “Sid Adger was an oilman who liked being around important people. I assumed that I wasn’t just doing a favor for Sid Adger but for the Bush family.” A protégé of LBJ, Barnes knew the political utility in doing favors that might someday “pay back a dividend or two.” He gladly placed the call, gave his backing, and collected a chit, just as he had for “dozens” of other influential Texans that included at least one other congressman: Texas congressman Frank Ikard, a Democrat from Texas’s Thirteenth District, whose son Bill was admitted to the National Guard after Barnes intervened on his behalf.
In 2004, as allegations that George H. W. Bush used his influence to get his son into the Guard swirled around his son’s presidential reelection campaign, the former president responded by calling them “a total lie.” “Nobody’s come up with any evidence but it comes up all the time,” he claimed. True enough. Barnes clarified in his 2006 memoir that Bush “did not contact me personally to ask for the favor,” which came solely through Adger. Six years earlier, in 1999, he said as much to Don Evans, George W.’s longtime friend and adviser during his governorship, who had been asked to look into the matter. Afterward, the governor sent a letter to Barnes that read, “Don Evans reported your conversation. Thank you for your candor and for killing the rumor about you and Dad ever discussing my status. Like you, he never remembered any conversation. I appreciate your help.”
After spending the summer and early fall in basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Bush took the first of several unusual leaves of absence that would mark his tenure in the Guard. At his parents’ urging, he spent the bulk of the eight-week leave doing low-level work as a travel aide in the U.S. Senate campaign—ultimately successful—of conservative Florida Republican Edward Gurney. Afterward, Second Lieutenant Bush took off in his blue Triumph convertible for thirteen months of flight school training at Moody Air Force Base in Valdosta, Georgia, where Bush learned to fly T-41, T-37, and T-38 aircraft, and finally the F-102 Delta Dagger. He proved his natural skill as a pilot, flying single engine aircraft and jets on a simulator, while jovially fitting in with the other troops, much as his father had during World War II, where crewmates on the USS Finback called him “GeorgeHerbertWalkerBush,” gently mocking his rarefied pedigree. George W. reverted to form, buddying up with many of his fellow trainees, most ultimately bound for Vietnam, chugging down beers with them at the officers’ club and tagging them with nicknames like “Fly” and “Chubby.” Bush’s flight commander, Major Norm Connant, recalled him as “a lively individual. He had a great personality and was eager to learn.” But aside from the fact that Bush was the only one being trained for the Guard of the seventy men, there were a stream of reminders that George W. Bush wasn’t just another rank-and-file military pilot.
The most memorable came in early 1969 when his father, who was throwing a party at Washington’s Alibi Club for Apollo 8’s commander, Frank Borman, called his son with a proposition. “How would you like to fly up to Washington for a dinner with an astronaut?” he asked in a phone call, adding that he had also invited first daughter Tricia Nixon. “I thought it might be fun if you took her to the party,” he said. Taken aback and noncommittal at first, George W. accepted the blind date only after betting his doubtful flight school buddies that the invitation was real. He found himself fifty dollars richer when a military plane later arrived at Moody to whisk him off to Washington for the occasion.
In spite of his father’s best matchmaking intentions, the date ended up a bust. What started less than auspiciously, with George W. entering through the gates of the White House for the first time in his life—behind the wheel of a purple AMC Gremlin, complete with Levi’s denim seats, that he had borrowed from his parents—ended up with the president’s eldest daughter asking to return home just after dinner. “Being a swashbuckling pilot, I had taken to drink,” George W. recalled of the date much later. “I reached for some butter, knocked over a glass and watched in horror as a stain of red wine crept across the table. Then I fired up a cigarette prompting a polite suggestion from Tricia that I not smoke.” When he returned to the dinner after escorting Ms. Nixon home, a friend of his father discreetly asked, “Get any?” “Not even close,” he replied.
Congressman Bush presided over his son’s graduation from flight school in December of the same year, serving as its keynote speaker and pinning his son’s wings on the lapel of his National Guard dress uniform. A photo of the elder and younger Bushes grinning ear to ear on the occasion shows clearly a father’s pride in his son. A few months later, the twenty-four-year-old congressman’s son, back in Texas for five months of additional training on the F-102 fighter interceptor, was the subject in a National Guard antidrug public relations press release, which read in part:
George Walker Bush is one of the members of the younger generation who doesn’t get his kicks from pot or hashish or speed. Oh, he gets high alright, but not from narcotics. Bush is a second lieutenant attached to the 11th Combat Crew Training Squadron, 147th Commander Crew Training Group, Texas Air National Guard at Houston . . . After a solo, a milestone in the career of any fighter pilot, Lt. Bush couldn’t find enough words to adequately express the feeling of solo flights . . . Lt. Bush is the son of U.S. Representative George Bush, who is a candidate for the U.S. Senate seat of Senator Ralph Yarborough. The elder Bush was a Navy fighter pilot. Lt. Bush said his father was just as excited and enthusiastic about his solo flight as he was . . . As far as kicks are concerned, Lt. Bush gets his from the roaring afterburner of the F-102.
As the statement indicated, the aspiring George Herbert Walker Bush, after gaining reelection to the House of Representatives in 1968, had once again taken aim at a seat in the U.S. Senate, the prize that had eluded him in his race with Yarborough four years earlier. Bush was considered a rising star in Washington, gaining the notice of Richard Nixon, who, while holding Bush in judgment for his Ivy League pedigree, had nonetheless considered him as his running mate in 1968 before settling on Maryland’s law-and-order governor Spiro Agnew. Nixon was in favor of Bush making a run for the Senate, despite putting at risk his seat in the lower house of Congress. A trip to the LBJ Ranch in Texas Hill Country to solicit the counsel of former president Lyndon Johnson confirmed what Bush likely already knew; “The difference between the Senate and the House is the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit,” the thirty-sixth president put it bluntly.
It came with a risk. Bush would be forfeiting another term as a representative in what had become a safe congressional seat. There was no such security in a Senate run, but he was in. At the time, he expected a rematch with Ralph Yarborough, whose progressivism was becoming increasingly out of step with Texas’s growing conservative bent. Instead he got Lloyd Bentsen, a successful forty-nine-year-old insurance and cattle magnate and former three-term U.S. representative whose affiliation with the Democratic Party belied conservatism more in keeping with the Texas electorate.
As with his congressional campaigns, George Bush’s Senate race became a family affair, with members of the Bush brood doing what they could to pitch in. As always, politics was a bonding experience. “Being in politics either brings you together or sends you apart, and in our case, it brought us all together,” Barbara said. “When the world was against my husband, it drew us closer together. We had something very big in common, which was we all were for George H. W. Bush.” When not obligated by National Guard duty, George W. was often on the campaign trail with his father, just as he had in his father’s first Senate foray, this time barnstorming across the state in a six-seat King Air. Six years older than he was during his father’s first Senate run, George W. occasionally took a turn behind the microphone. Wearing the National Guard jacket that became a stock part of his wardrobe, he demonstrated his facility with campaigning in what amounted to a discernible imitation of the man he was promoting. Doug Hannah, a young campaign aide and Bush family friend, observed, “The funniest part of the whole thing was watching George try to be his father—and talk like him, and picking up the mannerisms. He ultimately did it perfectly. I don’t know if it was conscious or not.”
Despite an all-out effort, Bush’s adopted state had once again rejected him. He found himself outpolled by Bentsen by 53.5 percent to his 46.6 percent. A high voter turnout, infused by Democrats in rural areas showing up at the polls to weigh in on a “liquor by the drink” proposition, was a deciding factor. “The loss hurt a lot more than 1964. That one could be explained by the Johnson landslide,” George W. wrote later. “This one seemed like the death knell for George Bush’s political career.” The question arose as to what Bush’s future would hold. The Dallas Morning News made it a headline: “What Will George Bush Do Next?” “The future—I don’t know,” he wrote a supporter, revealing to another, “We’re torn between staying in politics in some way, or moving back to Houston and getting fairly immersed in business.”
If the forty-six-year-old Bush’s future was up in the air, so was the future of twenty-four-year-old George W., who had taken his father’s defeat hard. “He was lost,” Doug Hannah observed of his friend after the campaign. “He was getting fairly aloof, and part of it was the embarrassment of his father losing in the Senate race. It was the first time that he had kind of lost his anchor. He wasn’t doing anything.”
Always resilient, optimistic, and blessed with more than a little luck, George H. W. Bush would soon find his way back toward success. It would take his son a little longer to find his own way.