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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But Fate’s monkeywrench, in the person of Lloyd Bentsen, Jr., jammed the gears of George Bush’s ambition. Fate’s mechanic was John Connally. Playing all the same tunes that Bush had been practicing for November, and with Connally’s chorus line to back him, conservative Democrat Bentsen unseated Yarborough in the May primary. Bush’s Yarborough Collection was rendered obsolete.
Defeated but still confident, Bush plunged into a singularly dull campaign against Bentsen. Or, better said, with Bentsen. Both candidates spent enormous sums to convince the electorate they were good family men with handsome children, church-goers and patriots who enjoyed long strolls in the woods. The only evident difference between them, judging from their own TV spots, seemed to be that Bush loosened his tie a little more and kept one hand in his pocket while strolling. A fatal error, apparently.
The turning point in the campaign, in Bush’s opinion, came less than a week before election day, when John Connally went on statewide television to denounce—not Bush, not Nixon, not the Republican Party or even Spiro Agnew—but the national economy, and endorsed his “good friend” Lloyd Bentsen. Bush lost his second race for the U.S. Senate by a greater margin than he lost his first. It was, he says, “a helluva blow, heartbreaking for my family and I.”
Looking back on it now, sitting in his office in Republican National Headquarters, he says “I don’t feel any resentment towards him [Connally]. He beat me clean and honest. He made filet out of me, but he never brought out the machete, never resorted to cheap demagoguery about being the ‘Ivy League carpetbagger who’s come down here to take over.’ [Note—the reference is to Frank Briscoe, who did.] He supported his friend and you can’t fault him for that. I’m glad to have him on our side.”
The words are there, and honestly delivered, but there’s no conviction in them. In normal conversation, George Bush looks you in the eye and talks with animation, emotionally, almost thinking out loud. When he speaks of John Connally, he stares in his lap and speaks quietly. He betrays hurt.
Within hours of the Senate election, Charles Bartlett, the syndicated Washington columnist and an old family friend, called to offer condolences. And hope. He told Bush of a powerful vacancy in the national hierarchy, one that he should try for and stood a good chance of getting—secretary of the treasury. Ambition rekindled, Bush flung his hat into the breach; he called his friend, Richard Nixon. Twenty-eight days after the election, the White House returned the call. Somehow, the lines into Houston got crossed. John Connally was named treasury secretary.
A month later, Bush got his consolation prize: Nixon appointed him U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Foreign Service veterans and State Department pros were disconsolate, muttering into their brandy that a “politician”—one wholly untutored, moreover, in the high arts of diplomacy or the watchworks delicacies of U.N. etiquette—had no business representing the U.S. on so fragile a stage. But Bush surprised them.
With his double-barreled come-on of Brahmin polish and Texian hustle, Bush stormed the U.N. with the same enthusiasm he’d earlier used to assault Congress. He became a new kind of U.N. ambassador: backslapping with foreign ministers, trading jokes in corridors and deals in anterooms, taking them all to the Mets games. Beneath all the multinational folderol, he’d discerned a simple truth: The U.N. votes on things, and votes mean politics and politics is what George Bush is best at in all the world.
Within six months he was being called the most effective U.N. spokesman this country has ever had. If he lost his most important battle—the vote to supplant Nationalist China with mainland China—he at least made it a horse race, and he won another that everyone said he’d lose—the vote to reduce America’s share of the U.N. bill.
But dark clouds, as they say, were gathering over the White House. Republican chairman Bob Dole had gotten on the wrong side of Chief Inquisitor Bob Haldeman—insufficient fealty was the charge—and Haldeman wanted him out. That was easily arranged. For a replacement, the White House sought someone with both unquestioned integrity and unquestioned loyalty to Richard Nixon. A rare animal indeed. Nixon called on Bush, who didn’t want to leave the U.N. (“It was the most fascinating experience you could hope for, the chance of a lifetime.”), but he did. Three months later, James McCord wrote a letter to John Sirica and The Year of Watergate was begun.
Bush was once asked if he didn’t think he’d had, well, a rather bad run of luck in his political career, what with his knack for timing and all …
“Oh, I don’t know as you could call it bad luck,” he answered. “After all, sometimes it turned out all right. I’d have never got to the U.N. if I hadn’t made the Senate race and lost, I guess. You know, I was talking to Nixon once and he said to me that we’re all controlled by events. And I just looked at him and said, yeah, uh-huh, whatever you say, and later on I wondered just what’n hell he meant by that. But I thought it over and after a while started to understand what he was saying. What I mean is, I guess I’m kind of a … fatalist. … ”
UNDER TEXAS’ “WEAK GOVERNOR” SYSTEM of government—wherein a baffling array of administrative posts are filled by election rather than appointment—scant few sinecures of influence remain for gubernatorial patronage. One that does is the governor’s slot on the three-man State Banking Board, which doles out state bank charters and hence occupies strategic high ground on the geopolitical battlefield. Another such post is Democratic national committeeman, the key liaison wtih the national party for a governor with national ambitions.
When John Connally was governor of Texas, Bob Strauss got both jobs. In 1963, he filled Connally’s first vacancy on the Banking Board, went on to serve throughout the Connally incumbency. He became national committeeman in 1968, at the same State Convention that chose Connally to be Texas’ favorite son candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination. Strauss’ predecessor was Frank Erwin, Connally’s chairman of the U.T. Board of Regents; the national committee-woman at the time was Mrs. Lloyd Bentsen, Jr.
Connally’s kinship with Strauss extended back beyond Connally’s rise to personal power. Both had earned their political spurs in the 1950s, when they were key lieutenants in the Lyndon Johnson-Sam Rayburn wing of the State Democratic Party. The goals of that faction were three-fold: to take control of the state party, to keep it within the mainstream of the national party (or at least on the bankside), and to elevate Lyndon Johnson to the presidency.
Strauss’ role within that general scheme was basically that of a fundraiser. Following law school and the War, he had joined a successful, middle-sized Dallas law firm, branched out into various business ventures of his own (communications, clothing, insurance), and sunk his roots deep into the Dallas financial community. Playing his contrapuntal connections with business interests against those with political movers, he beat out a rhythm that channeled considerable cash into the coffers of favored candidates.
One longtime Dallas political hand recalls: “Strauss was one of those people you went to early on, when you were planning a campaign. He always spoke for more than just himself, and he could get you a lot of money besides just his own. You wanted him on your side.”
Following his selection as national committeeman, Strauss became Texas finance chairman for the 1968 Humphrey-Muskie campaign. Despite the fact that friend/benefactor John Connally took a decidedly low profile role in that effort—some Democrats charged that Connally was supporting Nixon up until the last week of the campaign—Strauss himself was a whirlwind; a former Humphrey staffer says “he worked his ass off for us.” The Texas campaign was alone among the big states in paying all its bills, even sending some money along to the national party.
Shortly after the Humphrey defeat, Strauss was rewarded for his labors (and his connections) with election to the executive committee of the national party. Sort of the ruling politburo. It was from this vantage point, later in 1969, that Strauss pulled off what came to be known as his greatest coup.
The Democratic Party was sponsoring a $1000-a-plate fundraising gala in Miami Beach; months had been invested in preparation and a raft of Democratic superstars recruited to man the dais. Yet debacle loomed. A week before the dinner the hall was still half-empty and near-broke. With a typically Texan flare for drama and audacity, almost with bugles blowing and drums rolling, Bob Strauss came to the rescue. Into Miami flew a chartered jet filled with up to $100,000 worth of Lone Star high-rollers, plus the governor, the lieutenant governor and a host of Texas functionaries. Strauss was hailed as The Hero of Miami Beach and the nearly-ruined dinner proclaimed a grand success.
Strauss’ detractors like to point out that, in reality, most of the plane’s occupants dined for free and that the reported receipts from the Texas contingent came to under $30,000. Said detractors overlook the fact that in politics, as in everything else, it’s appearance that counts. Strauss’ Texas airlift spared the national party the embarrassing hemorrhage of a fizzled gala, and they were grateful.
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