One of my favorite memories of visiting Washington during Dad’s congressional years came when he brought me with him to the House gym. He knew the name of every worker and towel attendant in the facility. Dad loved to play paddleball, a fast-moving game that requires good hand-eye coordination. One of his favorite playing partners was Congressman Sonny Montgomery, a Democrat from Mississippi. They played to win, but all the while they whooped and hollered and needled each other, having a lot of laughs. It was a good reminder that Congressmen from opposite parties could put their differences aside and enjoy each other’s company.

Like every new Member, Congressman Bush was assigned to several legislative committees. My father hoped for a position on either Ways and Means or Appropriat

ions. Those powerful committees are usually off-limits to freshmen, but Dad had developed a relationship with Minority Leader Gerald Ford during his campaign, and his father pitched in by calling his old friend Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, the Ways and Means Committee Chairman. The House Republican leadership showed its confidence in Dad by making him the first freshman in sixty-three years to receive a seat on Ways and Means.

While my father benefited from his father’s connections, he also benefited from his mother’s lessons. He worked tirelessly, kept his promises, and was willing to stay out of the limelight in order to share credit with others. Those qualities were often in short supply in Congress, and that made people gravitate to George Bush. He became especially close with other young Members of Congress, including Bill Steiger of Wisconsin, Jerry Pettis of California, John Paul Hammerschmidt of Arkansas, and Bob Price of Texas. In a preview of things to come, his fellow Republicans elected him president of the freshman class.

In the late 1960s, two issues dominated life in Washington: the Vietnam War and civil rights. My father had supported the American effort in Vietnam from the beginning. He believed that allowing communists in North Vietnam to overrun the South would deny the people of South Vietnam the opportunity to live in freedom. He also worried about the spread of communism throughout Southeast Asia. The United States had made a commitment to defend the South Vietnamese, and he believed strongly that America had to keep its word.

The day after Christmas 1967, Congressman George Bush embarked on a sixteen-day trip through Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. He met with senior American officials. He also spent time with junior officers and enlisted men, including bomber pilots based on a carrier in the Tonkin Gulf, and asked for their unvarnished opinions on the war. Most told him that they were doing a lot better than the newspapers suggested.

My father came away impressed by the troops and convinced that America was making what he called “remarkable military progress.” He also saw the resilience of the Vietcong guerillas. In a letter to his constituents, he described the intricate tunnels that the Vietcong dug through the jungles as evidence of their persistence. “I am now convinced that our objective is realistic,” he told a reporter. “We can succeed if we have the will and the patience.”

Back at home, the war grew more divisive. Dad recognized the right of antiwar activists to express their views, but he was troubled by vitriolic and violent protests that demoralized the troops. He defended LBJ against the ugly personal attacks lobbed by activists. As the months went by, the Johnson administration failed to offer a clear rationale for America’s escalating involvement in the war. Thousands of young men were being drafted to fight a war that fewer and fewer people understood. For George H.W. Bush, the enduring lesson of Vietnam was that any commitment of the American military must include a clearly defined mission that the people can understand. Decades later, when he sent American troops to remove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, that’s exactly what he provided.

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MY FATHER’S TRIP to Vietnam also influenced his outlook toward the other explosive question facing the country: civil rights. Leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall were forcing the issue to the center of American politics. Throughout the South, civil rights activists opposed segregationist policies through sit-ins, freedom rides, and marches. The nation’s television screens were filled with scenes of horrible violence, including the brutal crackdown on protesters by sheriff Bull Connor and the church bombings in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young African-American girls. I later learned that one of them was a friend of my Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s. In 1963, President Kennedy proposed legislation prohibiting racial discrimination in public accommodations such as hotels, buses, and restaurants. In one of the most impressive acts of presidential leadership, President Johnson steered the Civil Rights Act through Congress in 1964.

My father had always been a strong believer in equal treatment of all people. Like his father, he had raised money for the United Negro College Fund. As party Chairman and a Congressman, he had reached out to African-Americans in Houston. In the 1964 Senate campaign, Dad had opposed the Civil Rights Act on federalism grounds. He believed that states, not the federal government, should control the regulation of public places.

Vietnam changed his views. During his trip to the front lines of the war, my father saw black and white men risking their lives side by side. In April 1968, the House of Representa

tives took up the Fair Housing Act, which outlawed racial discrimination in selling, renting, or advertising residential property. My father understood the argument that the federal government should not be able to dictate the conditions for the use of private property. But in his heart, George Bush is a fair man. He could not imagine telling an African-American veteran that he wasn’t allowed to buy a house for his family just because he was black.

Dad’s congressional district was nearly 90 percent white and heavily opposed to the open-housing bill. He estimated that the letters to his office ran thirty to one against the legislation. But on April 10, 1968, Congressman Bush voted in favor of the Fair Housing Act. He was one of only nine Texans to vote for the bill. (The other fourteen members of the Texas House delegation, thirteen Democrats and one Republican, opposed it.) President Johnson signed the bill into law the next day.

The reaction was swift and nasty. Dad’s office received one angry phone call after the next, and at least one person threatened his life. The congressional postal office later reported that he received more mail than any other Member of Congress that year, much of it ranting against his vote on the open-housing bill.

When he went home to Houston the weekend after the vote, Dad confronted the issue head-on. He held a town hall meeting that was packed with hundreds of constituents. Many of them greeted their Congressman with catcalls and boos, much like the reaction when Prescott Bush had denounced McCarthy.

What this bill did, he said, was “try to offer a promise or a hope—a realization of the American Dream.” He recounted his conversations with African-American soldiers in Vietnam, some of whom had told him about their desire to come home, get married, and buy a home. “Somehow it seems fundamental,” he said, “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.” (Negro was an accepted word at the time.)

He acknowledged the differences of opinion. “I voted from conviction,” he said. “I knew it would be unpopular—I knew it would be emotional—but I did what I thought was right; what more can I tell you!”