Nice Guys Finish Last
How young George Bush learned the importance of negative campaigning the hard way.
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So he told them that he knew what they thought. He told them that he knew some people called him lib-rull. But it wasn’t conservative or liberal, this vote. It was just fairness. He told them about Vietnam—those soldiers, how could he let them come back? How could you just slam the door in a guy’s face, just ’cause he’s a Negro, or speaks with an accent?
There was no more to say. He was going to sit down in the silence. He turned to thank the moderator and behind him he heard applause, a scattered bit—and then, when he turned, more clapping. Everybody was clapping. And then some stood, in front, and more behind. They were clapping—for him—because he did what he thought was right, and he’d said so. He didn’t think they agreed—still—but they gave him a standing ovation.
God! He could have kissed them all!
THAT’S HOW HE KNEW he was going to the Senate, not a doubt. This time, 1970, he would beat old Ralph Yarborough fair and square. He knew it—Texas was changing.
That’s what Bush kept saying. Yarborough was out of touch. The state had passed him by. People didn’t want that New Deal, promise-’em-the-moon kind of government or that kind of senator. They wanted a modern conservative. They wanted George Bush.
This time he’d have his ducks in a row. He’d been around; he had friends everywhere. This time he’d have a professional campaign manager: Marvin Collins, a Republican strategist from Austin, a great guy. He’d have a big budget—two million, for starters. And a Bush friend, John Tower, had taken over the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee; he’d send along whatever he could. And the president would help. President Nixon was on a roll, targeting races all over the country. Nixon said Texas was number one, and he asked Bush to run—personally!
Even LBJ might help. Bush went to see him. The old man certainly wouldn’t lift a finger to help Yarborough. Neither would John Connally. They all hated Ralph. This time Bush wouldn’t have to scrape for issues: He’d had his eye on Yarborough for six years. He had the old snake-oil salesman locked in the cross hairs.
Bush had such big plans for 1970—ads all over the state, and not just in cities but on every dustland radio station. Spanish too! Bush didn’t see why this race, his race, should not mark the realignment of Texas. Why shouldn’t the GOP grab its share of the Mexicans? And Negroes—my God, he ought to get some Negro votes! (Election night, 1968, though he had no contest, he’d grabbed for the tally sheets: He wanted to see those colored precincts. Wouldn’t you know it? Jeez! After all that, two thirds wouldn’t even cross over for him—with no Democrat against him!) But that wouldn’t matter. That would be gravy once he started hammering away at Yarborough, the old guard, the liberal, the tired voice of the past.
Then the unthinkable happened: With a vicious, attacking campaign, a South Texas Democrat, a businessman (and former representative) named Lloyd Bentsen came out of nowhere (actually, he came out of Connally’s hip pocket) and took the senior senator down. Yarborough lost his primary. George Bush lost his target.
Now it was Bush against Bentsen—and all of Bush’s plans were air. George tried to tell folks it was fine, this would be easier, but even his friends couldn’t see it. Bentsen was conservative—just like Bush, when you got down to it—and tough (he proved that against old Ralph). Bentsen could play the veteran card (he was a pilot in the war too) and the business card (he’d made more of a pile than Bush). He had the same congressional experience as Bush. He was just as nasty on Crime ’n’ Commies, a practiced South Texas hand with the Mexicans, a Democrat Texans could live with. So here came Lyndon’s pals from the Pedernales, and here came that greasy John Connally on the tube, making ads for Bentsen. Here came all the courthouse Dems, the yellow-dog Dems, and the better-dead-than-red Dems. Bentsen brought them back from the grave. Worse still, here came a ballot issue to allow sale of liquor by the drink. So thousands of rural Baptists would turn out against demon rum—and on the way, they’d likely vote the standard Democrat ticket.
And Bush? Well, he had the Republicans, but there still weren’t many of those. (The electorate was at least four-to-one Democratic.) He had his friends in the business, his constituents in Houston. His manager, Marvin Collins, tried to cook a deal with the liberal Democrats (who hated Bentsen for what he’d done to Yarborough) and nurtured a noisy group of Democrats for Bush. Bush still had high hopes for the Negro vote. He’d gone to the wall for those people!
That was half the problem. Everybody knew about his open-housing vote—Bentsen made sure of that. And about the time Bush had voted for the U.N. Bentsen brought that up too. In fact, Bentsen ran close enough to the right-field wall that there was no way Bush could get outside of him. Bush was the, uh, lib-rull!
Still, Bush was sure he could pull it out. People liked him. He had so many friends. He was working so hard. Bush still thought he could cast the race as the Democratic past against the future. “We’re on the threshold,” he’d scream at every speech, “of a new decade!” (No one had the heart to tell him that Texans didn’t accent that second syllable. He was working so hard. They didn’t want to hurt him.) If he could just show he was that future, that vigor, that youth. (With those kids rounded up by Rob Mosbacher—his youth coordinator—and by George W. “Junior” Bush—who’d cut away, when he could, from his National Guard flight training—the Bush campaign had the look of a Scout troop.) If only Bush could show, somehow, that Bentsen was just another page from the past . . .
But that was the other half of the problem: Bentsen didn’t seem to have any past—not like Yarborough, not a past they could use. They dug up Bentsen’s votes from Congress, but that was stuff from the forties; no one would give a damn. Oh, there was one guy who came in with a tip, said it would finish Bentsen. Bush sent Aleene to the Agriculture Department in Washington. She sat there all day, writing down the information. But when she brought the poop to Bush, he read the file and just shook his head. He wasn’t going to be that way in politics. No, he could only be what he was.
That’s how the problems started with Nixon. The president got it into his mind that George Bush would not go for the kill. Nixon sent money—more than $100,000 from one of his illegal slush funds—but Bush wouldn’t use it to take Bentsen down. The White House offered to send Tricia Nixon and David Eisenhower—or surrogates who’d throw red meat to the press, the tough guys. How about that Bob Dole? Or Spiro Agnew?
Bush didn’t want them, but when it got to Agnew, he could not say no. The vice president of the United States! So Agnew came, and then Nixon himself. How could Bush say no to the president? In the last days of the campaign, both made blistering partisan speeches—wiping out any hope Bush had with the Democrats.
On election night, family and friends gathered at the old Shamrock Hotel. Bush knew it would be tight—his last polls showed the race even. But he knew he could win: Good things happen to good people. He had to believe. The family was in a suite, upstairs from the big ballroom with the band, balloons, and streamers. George and Bar were on a couch with their children—George’s arms around Doro and Marvin, Bar holding Neil and Jebbie. They turned on the TV . . . and it was over. Twelve minutes into the broadcast, after two years of work ( seven years since he started for that seat), Walter Cronkite said his computers called the race for Bentsen. Doro started crying. Marvin Bush started crying. George Bush hugged them, told them it would be all right. Neil and Jebbie cried in Bar’s arms. The friends started crying. Aleene was sobbing. Sarah Gee started cursing the nuts. Nancy Crouch, a Harris County Republican operative, said she was through with politics. Marvin Collins felt like he’d been hit by a car. He went off to Junior’s apartment, and those two stayed teary till they were too blotto to care.
The one who didn’t cry was George Bush. He went around the suite, telling everyone what a great job they’d done. Then he was on the phone. “Well,” he’d say, “back to the drawing board.” Downstairs, in the ballroom, he conceded, then stayed for an hour, answering anything the press had to ask. Then he was back on the phone—all night. At five in the morning, he pulled out a list of hundreds of people he wanted to thank, and he started from the top. He’d be on the phone for sixteen hours straight. Bar couldn’t sit there and watch, couldn’t bear that, couldn’t chip in, brightly, like she had in ’64: “Well, there’ll be another time.” No, 1970 was different. George Bush had run for the Senate twice and lost. Could there be another time? She went off with her girlfriends to the club—a tennis game, her doubles. But she was standing at the net and kept thinking of George, on his phone, trying to cheer people, telling them they’d done so welland her eyes blurred with tears and she couldn’t even see the ball.
She felt the hand of a friend on her shoulder, and a voice: “Oh, the hell with this, Bar. Let’s go in and have a martini.”
So they did. They may have had several.
From the book What It Takes: The Way to the White House, by Richard Ben Cramer. Published in July 1992 by Random House. Copyright © 1992 by Richard Ben Cramer. Reprinted with permission.
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