My grandfather’s most influential friend in the capital was President Dwight Eisenhower. One key to developing the friendship was my grandfather’s golf game. Ike loved to play golf, and there was no better golfer in the Senate than Prescott Bush. Ike especially liked that the Senator, unlike most politicians, refused to let the President win. Years later, my brother Marvin invited me to play a round at the Burning Tree Club in Maryland, one of the places where my grandfather and President Eisenhower used to play. Marv introduced me to our caddie, who told me he had carried the bag for my grandfather decades earlier. After watching me play about five holes, he delivered his assessment. “Your grandfather was a hell of a lot better than you are,” he said. “He could shape it left, shape it right, make it move. When you hit it good, you’re just lucky.” The fellow wasn’t afraid to speak the truth.
One of Prescott Bush’s fellow Senators was Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. At the time, McCarthy was very popular with a certain segment of the country for his fervent anticommunism, which included making (often baseless) allegations that communists had infiltrated the top levels of the government. During his 1952 Senate campaign, my grandfather appeared at a campaign event with McCarthy. The other Republican candidates at the event lauded McCarthy, earning big cheers from the crowd. My grandfather considered McCarthy a demagogue and a bully. Prescott Bush was last to speak. “While we admire his objectives in the fight against communism,” he said, “we have very considerable reservations concerning the methods which he sometimes employs.”
The crowd booed lustily, but my grandfather was not intimidated. He later rejected a campaign contribution from McCarthy. Years later, when I learned about my grandfather’s stance, I admired his willingness to stand up to extremism. Boston Mayor James Michael Curley once summarized the philosophy of many politicians as, “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.” Prescott Bush had the courage and integrity to reject that view.
In 1956, my grandfather ran for reelection. He had established a strong record as a Senator, sponsoring important legislation like the Federal Highway Act and the bill creating the Peace Corps. He also earned a reputation for working tirelessly to serve his constituents. He spent Saturday mornings in the office answering every piece of mail that he had received that week. My father learned a valuable lesson: In politics, there is no substitute for staying in touch with the people you serve. Later, Dad followed his father’s practice of devoting Saturday morning to answering his mail.
My grandfather’s opponent in 1956 was Thomas J. Dodd, a Democratic Congressman and lawyer. Dodd took a populist line of attack against my grandfather. “I notice Senator Bush seems to have a lot of time to play golf,” he said. “I can’t afford to play golf.”
Then someone asked Dodd what his favorite hobby was. He said it was horseback riding. Without missing a beat, my grandfather said, “Well, I congratulate my opponent. I’ve never been able to afford a horse.”
My grandfather went on to win reelection by more than ten percentage points. (Years later, I had the chance to work with the affable Chris Dodd, the son of my grandfather’s opponent and a Senator from Connecticut for thirty years.)
In 1962, Prescott Bush was sixty-seven years old, suffering from arthritis, and exhausted from his demanding travel schedule. “You would be a fool to run again,” his doctor advised him, and he complied. I think he had second thoughts, especially after his health started to improve. He lived ten more years, and who knows what he might have accomplished in the political arena during that decade. His experience showed the importance of timing in politics. For Prescott Bush, the timing wasn’t right to continue. For his son, the time was right to begin.
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IT MIGHT SEEM hard to believe now, but for almost an entire century—from Reconstruction until 1961—not a single Republican won a statewide election in Texas. Between 1896 and 1959, the state never sent more than one Republican at a time to the U.S. Congress or the state senate. No more than two Republicans served together in the state legislature. In the 1950 and 1954 gubernatorial races, the Democratic candidate, Allan Shivers, won nearly 90 percent of the vote against his Republican opponents.
Despite the party’s minority status, I don’t think that Dad ever doubted that he was a Republican. His father’s politics had influenced him, and he agreed with the fundamental goals of the Republican Party: a vibrant free-enterprise system, a smaller and more accountable federal government, and greater decision-making at the state level. In Texas, Republicans and many Democrats weren’t all that far apart on those issues. Yet the Democrats were the party of power, and most Texans saw no reason to switch their allegiance.
As a Republican in Midland, Texas, Dad used to joke that he could hold party meetings in his living room and still have chairs left over. He strongly believed that Texas would benefit from a two-party system in which voters had an alternative to the Democratic political machine. So he got involved with the local Republican organization. He served as the Republican precinct chair in Midland and as a delegate at county conventions. He was a local leader in the Eisenhower presidential campaigns in 1952 and 1956. Those elections marked minor triumphs for Texas Republicans. For only the second and third times in history, the Republican presidential candidate won Texas’s electoral college votes.
My father’s first significant jump into politics came after we moved to Houston. He became involved with the Republican Party of Harris County, the largest county in the state. Dad worked hard to help elect Republican candidates, including John Tower, who won the 1961 special election to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Tower was Texas’s first elected Republican U.S. Senator since Reconstruc
In 1962, a handful of Houston friends asked Dad to run for Chairman of the Harris County Republican Party. He agreed and campaigned hard for the job, visiting every one of the more than two hundred precincts in the city, including some of the African-American areas that had probably never seen a Republican. Eventually, his only rival for the position withdrew, and the party elected my father unanimously. In retrospect, I am surprised that he agreed to take the job. Serving as a local party Chairman requires long hours of recruiting precinct Chairmen, building voter lists, and performing other thankless tasks at the grassroots level. As he had shown in the oil business, George Bush was not afraid to start at the bottom.
Dad’s job was complicated by an active fringe element in the party, the John Birch Society. The Birchers were extremists who peddled a variety of conspiracy theories. They claimed that Eastern elites like the Rockefellers wanted America to surrender its sovereignty to some kind of world super-government. As a result, the Birchers wanted to pull the United States out of the United Nations. They also wanted to impeach Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment, which authorizes the federal income tax, without replacing it with any reasonable alternative. George Bush understood that the more the Republican Party became identified with the Birchers, the less likely that Republicans would ever emerge as a viable alternative to Democrats in Texas.
Diplomacy was my father’s first instinct, and he tried hard to bring the Birchers into the fold. He instructed the party leadership to stop referring to Birchers as “nuts,” and he appointed Birch Society members to chair several important precincts. The move didn’t work. The Birchers railed against his leadership and refused to work with the so-called Republican establishment. So Dad purged the Birchers from their leadership posts and moved on without them.