Born to Run
What’s in a name? How about the Republican nomination for governor. Now the highly confident, but untested George W. Bush has to convince voters that he’s more than just a chip off the old block.
(Page 3 of 5)
During Bush’s Yale years, his father left the oil business and entered politics in Texas, losing a 1964 U.S. Senate race to the incumbent Democrat Ralph Yarborough. Afterward, George W. was walking across the campus when he saw the famed campus chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, who later became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War. Bush introduced himself. “Oh, yes,” said Coffin. “I know your father. Frankly, he was beaten by a better man.”
George W. was stunned by such a comment, furious that someone could so easily dismiss the old man. The incident engendered a lifelong distrust of Easterners and began to shape his own political thinking. “What angered me was the way such people at Yale felt so intellectually superior and so righteous,” he says. “They thought they had all the answers. They thought they could create a government that could solve all our problems for us.” At Yale, he adds, many students were plagued by what he calls guilt-ridden thought. “These are the ones,” says Bush, “who felt so guilty that they had been given so many blessings in life—like an Andover or a Yale education—that they felt they should overcompensate by trying to give everyone else in life the same thing.” While Democrats might say that Bush, in his college years, was already becoming elitist, one with little sympathy for the plight of the underprivileged, Bush says that his education only made him want to get back to Texas, as he puts it, “away from the snobs.”
By the time Bush graduated in 1968, his father had been elected to the House of Representatives out of Houston. At the time, it was often said that the elder George had gone into politics only to prove himself to his own father—the same allegation that would later be thrown at George W. But the younger Bush says he never felt any desire, as he got older, to enter public life. “People think we had ponderous political discussions at the dinner table,” he says. “Hell, our family dinners consisted of arguments about sports.”
During his twenties, as his father kept rising in the governmental ranks (ambassador to the United Nations, national chairman of the Republican party, U.S. liaison officer to China, CIA director), George W. carried on what he now calls his cavalier days in Houston. He lived the life of the classic bachelor, driving a Triumph, chasing women, drinking, and never seriously pursuing a career. If he ever seemed cowed by his father’s success, he never showed it. In 1973, when George W. was 26, he got drunk and drove over a neighbor’s trash can. When he was confronted by his father, the younger Bush challenged him to a fight, saying, “You want to go mano a mano right here?”
Standing up to his father might have been part of George W.’s struggle during those years to figure out how to be his own George Bush. He applied to and was rejected by the University of Texas School of Law. He worked for less than a year at a Houston agribusiness company—”A dull coat-and-tie job,” he says—and then he worked for a year in an anti-poverty program. On weekends, he flew F-102 fighter jets for the Texas Air National Guard (his father, of course, had flown a bomber in World War II). It has been reported that Bush mysteriously got ahead of a long waiting list to get into the Guard. When I ask him if he tried to avoid the draft, he grins and says, “Hell, no. Do you think I’m going to admit that? You are out of your mind. Let me give you the political answer, Mr. Reporter”—and then he tells me he wasn’t dodging anything. He says he even asked to be put on an alert program that could have sent him on a three-month rotation to Vietnam, but he was never called.
In 1973, telling no one in his family, he applied and was accepted to the graduate program at the Harvard Business School. “We never knew a thing about it until he just happened to mention to us that he was moving to Massachusetts,” says Barbara. Nor, after Harvard, did he consult his parents about moving to Midland. In 1975 the 28-year-old Bush threw his clothes in the back of his blue 1970 Cutlass and headed west, an eerie retracing of his father’s own move to Midland in a red 1947 Studebaker. “I could smell something happening,” George W. says about Midland in the mid-seventies, and a few years later, another oil boom did hit. With the boom came another generation of young oilmen, many of them childhood friends of Bush who also had gone off to good schools. Now, molded by an upper-class urbanity, they had returned to run their oil companies in button-down shirts and khakis and loafers.
With no job, without the slightest bit of training in the oil business, Bush began working for day wages as a landman, going through courthouse deeds, looking up ownership of mineral rights. His last name did open doors for him: The older leathery oilmen took to calling him Bush Boy and showed him the ropes. Bush soon formed his first company, Arbusto, which is the Spanish word for “bush” and pronounced “Ar-boost-o.” After he drilled a few dry holes, his friends sarcastically began calling the company Ar-bust-o.
George W. was determined to make it without financial support from his family. He lived frugally in a two-room concrete garage apartment, never cooking and rarely cleaning. “His apartment looked like a toxic waste dump,” says Charlie Younger. While he never developed a reputation as a particularly successful oilman—his father, in fact, had been far more adept at finding the gushers during his Midland days—Bush became one of Midland’s great young characters. He was a voracious partyer and beer drinker. One night, he and a friend climbed onstage at the Ector County Coliseum and stood at the back, singing along with Willie Nelson. Bush would go out to dinner at his favorite Mexican restaurant wearing a pair of flimsy black Chinese slippers that he had picked up while visiting his parents in Peking. He dressed so badly (to this day he hates pants with cuffs) that an annual tournament held among friends at the Midland Country Club began awarding a George W. Bush prize to the worst-dressed golfer at the tournament.
In June 1977 he met Laura, the daughter of a Midland homebuilder, and moving fastv”He’s a guy who does not hesitate to make decisions,” says a friend—they were married three months later in a small wedding in front of seventy people. Both were 31. “We didn’t even know he wanted to get married until he showed up at the door with this beautiful creature, Laura, and announced that she was going to be his wife,” says Barbara.
But what really shocked his friends—and, of course, his parents, who once again had no idea of his plans—was his announcement that he was entering the 1978 race for the House of Representatives in a West Texas district that stretched from Midland-Odessa past Lubbock. After 34 years, the incumbent Democratic officeholder, George Mahon, had decided to retire, and Bush, after just two years in Midland, saw another opportunity. If his father’s political ambition was shaped by the idea of noblesse oblige, the obligation of public service among those born in high places, George W.’s was shaped by the idea of carpe diem: Seize the day. Close the deal. Make something happen.
His friends did not know that he even cared that deeply about politics. “They were a little confused about why I was doing this,” admits Bush, “but at that time, Jimmy Carter was president and he was trying to control natural gas prices, and I felt that the United States was headed toward European-style socialism.”
“Were you trying to show people that you too could do something that your dad had done?” I ask.
“Absolutely not,” he says. “Hell, no. I wanted to run.”
“George did sort of leap into it,” says Laura, “but even back then he was smart enough to know that a lot of politics was simply timing. You know, there are a lot of would-be governors of Texas sitting around today who never took the opportunity to get into a race when the time was right. If George is good at anything, it’s timing.”
In what seemed to be a largely amateur effort, Bush recruited his oil buddies, all political novices, to act as his campaign advisers. He never asked his father for help (although his mother did send out a letter to the people on her Christmas card list, asking them to contribute to the campaign).
Bush’s opponent in the Republican primary called him a carpetbagger, a Connecticut Yankee, and a member of the Rockefeller-controlled Trilateral Commission, which, according to the opponent, was trying to take over the world. “I didn’t even know what the Trilateral Commission was,” says Bush, who won the primary anyway. He then lost 53 percent to 47 percent in the general election to the popular Democratic state senator Kent Hance of Lubbock. Near the end of the campaign, the easygoing Bush lost votes when he was accused of loose morals because he had served beer at a meet-the-candidate party for Texas Tech students.
My Library
