August 1992
Nice Guys Finish Last
How young George Bush learned the importance of negative campaigning the hard way.
George Bush knew he was headed for the Senate. That’s where he belonged, like his dad. He had no doubt. He could have held his House seat forever, like a birthright: That new district, Houston’s seventh, had been birthed for him. After one term, he was unopposed.
And he was a certified star: There were forty new Republicans elected to that Congress, in the rebound after the Goldwater debacle. Bush was chosen as president of the freshman class. For the first time in decades, a GOP freshman got a seat on Ways and Means. (Prescott Bush, a former Connecticut senator, had called on old friends for his son.) From the start, everybody knew about this bright, handsome young Republican from Houston—a chink, at last, in the solid South. George Bush was the party’s bold breeze of the future.
He was invited to address GOP luncheons and breakfasts of bigwigs. He’d talk about the revival of the two-party system, change on the southern wind. What a hopeful vision! He wore that excitement like a suit coat thrown over one shoulder, as he strode down the hallways with a greeting and a grin. He was having such a good time.
It wasn’t legislating that ran his motor: He wasn’t one of those annoying first-termers who think they’ve got to make floor speeches and pepper the House with bills. The only bills he pushed were aid for birth control (always an interest of his father’s, maybe unfinished business for the old man) and a short-lived proposal on congressional ethics. (This pup published his tax returns!) Most of his work he did in committee, as a quiet, respectful student of the chairman, Wilbur Mills. (Mills loved him. After the kid filed that birth-control bill, Mills always called him Rubbers.) When the bells rang, Bush would hustle to the oor, check in. But on routine days, he could leave with his new friend, the Mississippi Democrat Sonny Montgomery, for a do-or-die dollar-a-game paddleball match in the House gym.
It was the life itself that Bush found bracing—all the doing, new friends. He was in such demand! There wasn’t ten minutes to sit around: He had committee, he had lunch, a meeting at Interior. He’d grab his coat and bolt for his office door, calling over his shoulder to his secretary, Aleene Smith, who’d come with him from Houston: “Allie! See what Mr. Holburn needs, will you—he’s on the phone!” He’d run through the afternoon, with that lock of hair falling onto his forehead and the ladies of his office clucking, through their smiles, “Mr. Bush! Tuck in your shirttail!”
(In Houston—it was Houston every other weekend, no matter the effort required—the office ladies adored George Bush. Sometimes, if things got slow, Bush would exit his inner office in a flying ballet leap, just to make les gals giggle. Late one day, a little woman came by. She was a mousy sort, no makeup, poor dress—probably a hard-luck case. She wanted to see Mr. Bush. But the ladies had no time to tell him before he flew into the office in a twisting tour jeté. Then he saw the woman. He froze—on the ball of one foot, with his arms outstretched—and blushed crimson to the roots of his hair.)
No wonder they loved him and talked about the way he was—how a man like that could be so nice. He’d pick up the phone himself if it rang more than twice, and he’d listen to some voter’s tale of woe. (“No,” he’d say into the phone. “No, that doesn’t sound right at all. We’ll look into it, right away. No! Thank you for calling!”) Same with the mail: answers by return post. Aleene would cram his battered briefcase every night; there might be thirty or forty letters typed up. He’d sign every one and add a couple of lines in his lefty scrawl. The Capitol postman told Aleene that Bush got more mail than anyone else in the Longworth Building. (That’s because he sent more. One Houston lady wrote him a letter. So he wrote her back. So she wrote to thank him for his response. So he wrote her back, thanking her for her thank-you note. Finally, she sent him a letter that said: “You remind me of my aunt, Mrs. Ponder. She just won’t stay written to.”)
This wasn’t exactly politics with Bush; more like life. The day his moving van arrived in Washington, it was a terrible snow. George sent Barbara off to Sears, through the storm, to buy sheets so the movers could stay the night: He insisted! Don Rhodes was a volunteer on his campaign in Houston. Rhodes had a hearing problem, and people thought he was strange, maybe slow-witted. (He wasn’t.) Bush not only took him along for the Washington staff—he moved Don into his house. He fussed over visitors to his office, posing for pictures, leading tours of the Capitol, making sure they got to see everything in Washington. And wasn’t it great how it worked out? Bush inherited a couple of staff ladies from the Texas Democrat who used to represent his part of Houston—so of course they knew the crowd in LBJ’s White House. They’d call up and get special tours—not just of the state rooms, but of the Family Quarters. (That picture of George Hamilton on Lynda Bird’s night table!) Well, you put that together with a ride on Bush’s boat (George just had to show them how the city looked from the Potomac) and Bar’s picnic (with the pâté, wine, and salad) and … no wonder he was unopposed!
In fact, that was one reason he could cast his vote on the 1968 open-housing bill: Bush knew he would face no opponent in November. Still, there’d be a howl of protest. In the gym, Sonny Montgomery told him, “Your district ain’t gonna like this.” Bush didn’t need analysis from Sonny. For God’s sake, some of Bush’s voters wouldn’t ride in a car that a Negro had sat in, play the same golf course. Bush agonized for weeks.
What stuck in his mind was Vietnam: those soldiers, black soldiers, in the jungle, in the uniform of their country. How could he let them come back to a nation where they couldn’t live where they chose? He could not. He couldn’t let politics change the way he was.
So he voted for the bill. He meant to take the heat.
But this wasn’t heat. This was ugly. First the calls—les gals had to hear them:
“You tell Bush we don’ need no Connecticut Nigra-lovers.”
“Are you half nigger-blood too?”
Then the letters—thousands of letters. Don Rhodes was up all night trying to get out answers. But how could Bush answer?
“It’s Communist says who I can sell my house to.”
“I know niggers are running the government.”
The threats menaced his staff and his family. One letter mentioned his children by name. After a week, Bush looked like he’d aged ten years. His face sagged. There was no excitement in his words or walk. He went back to Houston—and that was worse. The office felt like the Alamo. The ladies tried to cheer him: “They’re just kooks,” Sarah Gee, one of his assistants, said.
“They aren’t thinking.”
“Everybody else is for you.”
Bush just sat at his desk, staring at the wall. Sarah saw the look of the bereaved. She didn’t even know why she said it—it just came out: “Oh, George, I’m sorry.”
Bob Mosbacher called, said the money men were up in arms. “You want me to try to get ’em together, talk to them?”
Bush’s voice was weary: “No, I gotta do it myself.”
So he did. He got 25 big givers into a room. Bush had the air of a man who had been beat up. “I know we agree on so much,” he told them. He didn’t ask them to support his vote—just to keep in mind the other votes. It was almost pleading. “If you can’t support me anymore—well, I hope I can still have your friendship.”
He did feel he was beaten—not this time (no, it was too late to lose reelection), but what about the next time? What about the Senate? All the great doings, the big plans ahead? In fact, his loss went deeper than elections: It had to do with the choices he had made for twenty years, his feeling that he could speak for Texas. Was he wrong? God! What if it was all wrong?
He wrote to a friend: “I never dreamed the reaction would be so violent. Seething hatred—the epithets—the real chickenshit stuff in spades—to our [office] girls: ‘You must be a nigger or a Chinaman’—and on and on—and the country club crowd disowning and denouncing me… .”
“Tonight [I was on] this plane and this older lady came up to me. She said, ‘I’m a conservative Democrat from this district, but I’m proud, and will always vote for you now’—and her accent was Texan (not Connecticut) and suddenly somehow I felt that maybe it would all be OK—and I started to cry—with the poor lady embarrassed to death—I couldn’t say a word to her.”
He would always remember the moment when he knew it was going to turn out all right. He was at a town meeting. The crowd booed him and muttered his name with a menacing hiss as he was introduced.
