Running the county party turned out to be a valuable experience. He learned how to recruit and motivate volunteers. He gained experience managing a political organization. He formed friendships with other Republican county Chairmen and Republican leaders throughout the state. And he learned that there are some people on the extremes of the American political spectrum who would rather hurl invectives than work for the common good.
—
ON SEPTEMBER 11, 1963, George Bush held a press conference in Austin to announce his candidacy for the United States Senate. I had just started my senior year at Andover. I was no expert on politics, but I knew enough to recognize that this race was a long shot. My father was a thirty-nine-year-old businessman and county party leader who had never held public office. He had little name recognition outside Houston and Midland. And he was a Republican in a state that almost uniformly elected Democrats.
My father never asked my opinion about his decision to run, and I didn’t expect him to. Of course, he talked to Mother. She later told me that her only reservation about Dad’s running for office was that he would win and they would run out of money. After all, there were no East Coast trust funds to support them. Mother did not want money to buy lavish things; as she put it, “I just wanted to make sure we could afford to send your brothers and sister to college.” My father convinced her that they were financially secure, and from then on she was all in. Working hard to help George Bush’s campaign succeed was another time that she went three-quarters of the way for the man she loved.
George Bush was in the race for the right reasons. He felt the same duty to serve others that led Prescott Bush to serve as the Greenwich town moderator and to give up his Wall Street career to serve in the Senate. He also knew from watching Prescott Bush that it was possible to enter public service and remain a good father and a good man. That was a lesson that I learned from them both. Needless to say, Prescott Bush fully supported his son’s decision to run, even if he knew it was a long shot.
The first stage of the contest was the Republican primary, a four-way race that pitted my father against Jack Cox, Robert Morris, and Milton Davis. Cox was the front-runner. Like Dad, he came from the oil business in Houston. He had served in the Texas state legislature for six years before joining the first wave of Democrats to switch parties. In 1962, Cox had won more than 45 percent of the vote in his run for Governor against Democrat John Connally.
My father dashed back and forth across the huge state. There was no coffee gathering or chamber of commerce banquet too small for him to attend. He laid out his case for “responsible conservatism” and his vision for a two-party state. After each campaign event, he sent handwritten notes to the people he had met. He must have written thousands of them that spring. Republicans responded to his warm personality, his energy, and his impressive biography. One person at a time, George Bush was building a political following.
Dad’s hard work paid off in the primary. He won 44 percent of the vote, compared with 32 percent for Cox. Texas election law requires a nominee to get 50 percent of the vote, so he and Cox squared off again in a runoff. He had to skip my high school graduation because of the election, but I didn’t mind. I wanted him to win. And he did. He prevailed in the runoff with about 62 percent of the vote.
—
THE 1964 SENATE RACE in Texas may have included involvement from more future and former Presidents than any other Senate campaign in history. Dad was one of them, of course. I campaigned for him during the summer after I graduated from high school. So did Richard Nixon, whom my grandfather had gotten to know in the Senate. Dwight Eisenhower, still a close friend of Prescott Bush’s, supported Dad. The sitting President, Lyndon Johnson, campaigned for the Democratic incumbent, Ralph Yarborough, who also had the support of President Kennedy before he was assassinated.
Senator Ralph Yarborough was a liberal populist who subscribed fully to the big-spending plans of the Great Society. He supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which many Texans opposed as an overreach by the federal government into an issue that they felt should be decided by the states. Yarborough attacked my father’s ties to the oil industry and tried to portray him as a wealthy Northeastern carpetbagger. One critic printed a flyer claiming that my mother was an heiress who spent all her time on Cape Cod. Shortly thereafter, my dad received a letter from Marvin Pierce. Mr. Pierce delivered the bad news that Mother was not an heiress. Nor had she ever been to Cape Cod.
In his opening speech of the general election, Dad called Yarborough “a man who has fostered, finagled for, and flourished on a diet of spend, spend, spend the taxpayers’ money.” Dad’s platform called for a tax cut and a balanced budget, smaller government that encouraged free enterprise, and a “courageous” foreign policy “designed to extend freedom.”
Given that Texas Democrats far outnumbered Republicans, Dad had no choice but to appeal to the conservative wing of the Democratic Party and try to outhustle his opponent. He chartered a bus nicknamed the “Bandwagon for Bush.” I traveled with him on a bus trip to West Texas, where we stopped in Democratic strongholds such as Abilene and Quanah. Those trips were like the ultimate father-son camping experience. We would pull into a town square, and a country band called the Black Mountain Boys would start playing in hopes of drawing some kind of a crowd. The Bush Belles, an enthusiastic and brightly clad group of housewives, would pass out campaign pamphlets. My job was to run back and forth to the bus to make sure that the Belles and other campaign volunteers had all the materials that they needed. Then Dad would mount the podium and give a speech. Some in the audience applauded and cheered. Others just looked startled at the sight of a real-life Republican.
Campaigning with my dad was a thrilling experience. I was amazed by my father’s energy and his drive. I learned about the elements of a campaign, including the “stump speech.” At first I was surprised that Dad delivered the same speech at every campaign stop. For those traveling with him, hearing the same lines over and over again could be tiresome. (Perhaps that was the reason Mother started needlepointing purses for key volunteers during campaign trips.) For the crowd in each city, however, the speech was brand-new. And even if the entourage was bored, Dad was not. He was a sincere and emotional speaker who recognized that every minute is precious in a campaign. I grew to love the daily rhythms of the campaign—the crowds and the competition. It might have been that summer of 1964 when I caught the political bug myself.
Dad’s campaign gained some momentum throughout the summer and fall, but it received a devastating blow on the day the President entered the race. While Ralph Yarborough may have been beatable in Texas in 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson was not. Even though Yarborough had taken positions to LBJ’s left—and even though LBJ liked and respected Prescott Bush—the President couldn’t afford to lose a Democratic seat in the Senate. Johnson praised Yarborough as a fellow Democrat and deftly tied Dad to Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who had lost traction after LBJ’s “daisy ad” portraying him as eager to engage in a nuclear war.
In the final weeks of the campaign, it was obvious that LBJ was surging in his home state. Dad convinced several major Texas newspapers to endorse both him and LBJ. Ticket splitting offered the only path to victory for George Bush, who remained upbeat to the end. On Election Day, my grandparents and I flew down to Houston from Connecticut, where I had started my freshman year at Yale. I remember driving to the Hotel America for the “victory” party right after the polls closed. We were listening to a radio broadcast that was interrupted by the news that Ralph Yarborough had won reelection.