Bob and George Go to Washington or The Post-Watergate Scramble
George Bush and Bob Strauss are battling to see whether the Democrats or the Republicans will pick up the nation’s political pieces. Sounds straightforward. Well, it’s not.
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A partner in the prestigious Wall Street firm of Brown Brothers, Harriman & Co. (that’s Averell Harriman, one should know), Prescott Bush shared his Brahmin Republicanism with the likes of the Lodges and Saltonstalls, a heritage reaching all the way back to the abolitionist origins of the GOP. More than any definable philosophy, it is rather a tradition, a kind of noblesse oblige that has men of “standing” offer themselves for “public service.”
Prescott Bush had helped start the “Draft Ike” movement while the Party warhorses were out beating the bushes for Bob Taft, later entered the Senate as a kind of low-keyed maverick, almost an independent missionary trying to civilize all the politicians.
Son George, meantime, was making his fortune in the Permian Basin oil boom, was active in every conceivable civic enterprise, was fundraising and speechmaking for the GOP. Like everything else in Midland-Odessa, politics is run on a frontier ethic, yer either fer-us er agin-us and thar ain’t no in-between; regardless of party labels, the ideological substance is skewed far to the right, as stark and narrow as the trees. The Republican Party of George Bush was as far removed from that of his father as Odessa from Greenwich.
When Bush moved to Houston in 1958, he brought along his oil company, his politics, and his inclination to public service. Five years later, he ran for his first political office—Harris County Republican Party chairman.
He attached his own label that time: “Goldwater Republican,” which, in Texas in those days, was understated redundancy. He became as active a county chairman as the Republican Party had ever seen, opening full-time offices, venturing into black wards to woo voters, taking public positions on local issues, bringing suits on election laws and redistricting. By the next year, 1964, Bush decided it was time to move up: he announced himself as a candidate for the U.S. Senate.
Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough was, in many ways, even more of an outcast than a Republican in Democratic Texas. It wasn’t just that he was determinedly, aggressively liberal, though that would have been obstacle enough. But he was a well sworn enemy of the Texas Democratic Establishment, beginning all the way at the top with Lyndon Johnson and working down to encompass the past five state governors (most especially including then-incumbent Governor John Connally). Anyone who ran against him could count on heavy financial support regardless of party allegiance.
Bush launched a campaign that was well-organized, well-funded, well-advertised, bursting with energy and wholly devoid of party identification. He’s been oft-criticized for “being afraid to run as a Republican,” but, as he sees it, “it’s a matter of common sense. When you’re running in Democratic country you play down party labels. They do the same thing, it works both ways.”
In the 1964 Presidential Election, from Bush’s standpoint, the land slid the wrong way. In addition, Lyndon Johnson and Ralph Yarborough swallowed their personal enmity long enough to fashion a united Democratic front, and Yarborough was an easy winner. Bush, however, stacked up more votes than any Republican in Texas history, even while losing, and the meatpricers of politics all carefully noted his apparent popularity.
Two years later, he was ready again. Thanks in part to Bush’s own redistricting suit, the Texas Legislature had been forced to draw congressional districts that bore some marginal relation to where the voters lived, and a virgin congressional seat was opened in the middle-class western third of Harris County, home of George Bush and most of whatever Republicans there were.
Almost from the day the district was unveiled, Bush was running. The Democratic nominee, former district attorney Frank Briscoe, ran a campaign that was loudly against crime, sin, and race-mixing, and attacked Bush for being a carpetbagger from Connecticut. Out-lunged in competition for the Minute-man vote, Bush was paradoxically cast as the liberal in the contest (doubtless a curiosity for someone still owning up to “Goldwater Republicanism”), a misnomer that helped fashion his still-current reputation as a “moderate.”
Bush countered with a secret weapon: a young media wizard named Harry Treleaven whom Bush had discovered on (where else?) Madison Avenue. Treleaven, who later went on to bigger campaigns and greater glory (cf., Joe McGinniss, The Selling of a President, 1968), produced a series of flashy TV commercials that showed candidate Bush, coat-slung-over-shoulder, surrounded by family, tall and youthful, earnest and trustworthy. There was again no mention of political party (said Bush, “labels are for cans”) and scant reference to issues. He won hands down.
Bush landed in the Capital without even slowing up. His combination of Ivy League class and Texas style, family connections and oilman knowhow, made a near-awesome impact in Washington. He was universally hailed as “someone to keep an eye on,” and quickly welcomed to the bosom of D.C. society, an infinitely more difficult feat than merely getting elected to Congress.
As one of the leaders of the “New Breed” of GOP congressmen—all young, articulate, wholesome—he was named to the Ways and Means Committee, the most Olympian of all House committees, only the third freshman in this century so honored. He quickly set about earning his keep by building a reputation for expertise in oil matters. Remembers a Ways and Means staffer: “He was one of the sharpest people that’s ever been on this committee.”
The four years Bush spent in the House comprise the sole chapter in his political career when he spoke only his own mind, a free agent in the sport of government. Thus, they represent the truest distillation of his worldview, his beliefs; like everything else that comes filtered through Washington, it is confusing and ambivalent.
By simply feeding his voting record through the reductive threshers of the special-interest score-keepers (labor and business, left and right), he emerges as a Gold-Star conservative; not quite off in the brackish pools of obstruction where some of his colleagues swim but, still, at the salt-water line.
To judge a politician, though, on the sole evidence of his voting record is to take a sterile measure of him, to make a one-dimensional assessment. It’s rather like picking an All-Star team only on the basis of batting averages, discounting things like fielding, home runs, desire or (important category) stolen bases.
Judged on the same narrow terms, California Congressman Pete McCloskey—a Republican maverick who fought Nixon on the Vietnam war and called for his resignation—would seem just as liberal as Bush is conservative, yet he calls Bush “one of the finest men I’ve ever served with in the House. Of any party, whether liberal, conservative or what-have-you. George is someone you can count on to sit down and help find solutions to problems without considering the politics of the situation first. He’s got a compassion and open-mindedness that the rest of the Nixon Administration lacks.”
In his freshman year, Bush helped lead the perennial battle to reform the hide-bound House rules; later, he introduced an important ethics bill and fought for campaign finance legislation, became one of the first to disclose his personal finances; he was also an imaginative spokesman for population control and drew high marks from conservationists on other environmental matters. The most significant vote of his career, though, in most ways, came on the 1968 Civil Rights Act.
Although he supported several efforts to amend the open housing provisions in it, failing in each case, when the bill came up for final passage he voted for it. “All in all,” he said, “it’s a good law.” A good many of his arch-conservative avalanched with race-baiting hate mail, and he was the target of vicious invective and at least one assassination threat. He himself was stunned by the response: “It was worse than anything you could’ve expected. Some of it was sick, really sick.”
Bush’s response was, by the decidedly uncourageous norm of Washington politics, gallantly suicidal. Rather than diving beneath an ambiguous mountain of witless press releases (the accepted practice), Bush straightaway returned to his district to face the music. Weathering cat-calls and abuse, he faced down obscene fanatics to tell his constituents he did what he thought was right and, moreover, he wasn’t sorry for it. Played against the backdrop of hysteria and bigotry, Bush’s plea for understanding and common sense won him standing ovations; as performance it was high drama, and betrayed a depth of character that few politicians could muster.
Scott Fitzgerald would’ve loved it.
IT’S EIGHT O’CLOCK ON A Wednesday morning and Bob Strauss is crossing the Sheraton-Carlton Hotel lobby on his way to a Godfrey Sperling Breakfast, a ritual gathering of the best political writers in the nation’s capital. These breakfasts are sponsored by Godfrey Sperling, Washington bureau chief of The Christian Science Monitor, and are considered one of the most opportune places to “drop something,” to casually mention that such-and-such is about to happen, and get it rapidly disseminated throughout Washington and the Western World.
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