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          Mon, 04 Jan 1993 03:39:21 est
Date: Mon Jan  4 03:39:04 est 1993
From: "John Covici" <[email protected]>
Message-Id: <[email protected]>
Reply-To: "John Covici" <[email protected]>
Organization: Covici Computer Systems
To: [email protected]
Subject: Unauthorized Biography of George Bush: Part 10
Status: O
X-Status:
CHAPTER TEN/Part I

The Senate Race


Bush's unsuccessful attempt in
1964 to unseat Texas Democratic
{Senator Ralph Yarborough} is a
matter of fundamental interest to
anyone seeking to probe the wellsprings
of Bush's actual political thinking. In
a society which knows nothing of its
own recent history, the events of a
quarter-century ago might be classed as
remote and irrelevant. But as we review
the profile of the Bush Senate campaign
of 1964, what we see coming alive is
the characteristic mentality that rules
the Oval Office today. The main traits
are all there: the overriding obsession
with the race issue, exemplified in
Bush's bitter rejection of the civil
rights bill before the Congress during
those months; the genocidal bluster in
foreign affairs, with proposals for
nuclear bombardment of Vietnam, an
invasion of Cuba, and a rejection of
negotiations for the return of the
Panama Canal; the autonomic reflex for
union-busting expressed in the rhetoric
of ``right to work''; the paean to free
enterprise at the expense of farmers
and the disadvantaged, with all of this
packaged in a slick, demagogic
television and advertising effort....
  Bush's opponent, Senator Ralph
Webster Yarborough, had been born in
Chandler, Texas in 1903 as the seventh
of 11 children. After graduating from
Tyler High School as Salutatorian, he
received an appointment to the U.S.
Military Academy at West Point, which
he attended for one year. After working
in the wheat fields of Oklahoma and a
six-month stint teaching in a small
rural school, he went on to Sam Houston
State Teachers College for two terms.
He was a member of the 36th Division of
the Texas National Guard, in which he
advanced from private to sergeant.
After World War I, he worked a passage
to Europe on board a freighter, and
found a job in Germany working in the
offices of the American Chamber of
Commerce in Berlin. He also pursued
studies in Stendahl, Germany. He
returned to the United States to earn a
law degree at the University of Texas
in 1927, and worked as a lawyer in El
Paso.... Yarborough entered public
service as an assistant attorney
general of Texas from 1931 to 1934.
After that, he was a founding director
of the Lower Colorado River Authority,
a major water project in central Texas,
and was then elected as a district
judge in Austin.
  Yarborough served in the U.S. Army
ground forces during World War II, and
was a member of the only division which
took part in the postwar occupation of
Germany as well as in MacArthur's
administration of Japan. When he left
the military in 1946, he had attained
the rank of lieutenant colonel. It is
clear from an overview of Yarborough's
career that his victories and defeats
were essentially his own, that for him
there was no Prescott Bush to secure
lines of credit or to procure important
posts by telephone calls to bigwigs in
freemasonic networks.
  Yarborough had challenged Allan
Shivers in the governor's contest of
1952, and had gone down to defeat.
Successive bids for the state house in
Austin by Yarborough were turned back
in 1954 and 1956. Then, when Senator
(and former Governor) Price Daniel
resigned his seat, Yarborough was
finally victorious in a special
election. He had then been reelected
to the Senate for a full term in 1958.

  Yarborough in the Senate

  Yarborough was distinguished first
of all for his voting record on civil
rights. Just months after he had
entered the Senate, he was one of only
five southern senators (including LBJ)
to vote for the watershed Civil Rights
Act of 1957. In 1960, Yarborough was
one of four southern senators--again
including LBJ--who cast votes in favor
of the Civil Rights Act of 1960.
Yarborough would be the lone senator
from the 11 states formerly comprising
the Confederate States of America to
vote for the 1964 Civil Rights Bill,
the most sweeping since Reconstruction.
This is the bill which, as we will see,
provided Bush with the ammunition for
one of the principal themes of his 1964
election attacks. Later, Yarborough
would be one of only three southern
senators supporting the Voting Rights
Act of 1965, and one of four supporting
the 1968 open housing bill.@s5
   ... Yarborough had become the
chairman of the Senate Committee on
Labor and Public Welfare. Here his
lodestar was infrastructure:
infrastructure in the form of education
and infrastructure in the form of
physical improvements.
  In education, Yarborough was
either the author or a leading
supporter of virtually every important
piece of legislation to become law
between 1958 and 1971, including some
nine major bills. As a freshman
senator, Yarborough was the co-author
of the National Defense Education Act
of 1958, which was the basis for
federal aid to education, particularly
to higher education. Under the
provisions of NDEA, a quarter of a
million students were at any given time
enabled to pursue undergraduate
training with low-cost loans and other
benefits. For graduate students, there
were three-year fellowships that paid
tuition and fees plus grants for living
expenses in the amount of $2200, $2400
and $2600 over the three years--an
ample sum in those days. Yarborough
also sponsored bills for medical
education, college classroom
construction, vocational education, aid
to the mentally retarded, and library
facilities. Yarborough's Bilingual
Education Bill provided special federal
funding for schools with large numbers
of students from non-English speaking
backgrounds. Some of these points were
outlined by Yarborough during a
campaign speech of September 18, 1964,
with the title ``Higher Education As It
Relates To Our National Purpose.''
  As chairman of the veterans
subcommittee, Yarborough authored the
Cold War G.I. Bill, which sought to
extend the benefits accorded veterans
of World War II and Korea, and which
was to apply to servicemen on duty
between January 1955 and July 1, 1965.
For these veterans, Yarborough proposed
readjustment assistance, educational
and vocational training, and loan
assistance, to allow veterans to
purchase homes and farms at a maximum
interest rate of 5.25 percent per
annum. This bill was finally passed
after years of dogged effort by
Yarborough against the opposition of
Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and
Johnson. Yarborough was instrumental in
obtaining a five-year extension of the
Hill-Burton Act, which provided 4,000
additional beds in Veterans
Administration hospitals.
  In physical improvements,
Yarborough supported appropriations for
coastal navigation. He fought for $29
million for the Rural Electrification
Administration for counties in the
Corpus Christi area alone. In 11
counties in that part of Texas,
Yarborough had helped obtain federal
grants of $4.5 million and loans of
$640,000 under the Kennedy
administration accelerated public works
projects program, to provide clean
water and sewage for towns and cities
which could not otherwise afford them.
Concerning his commitment to this type
of infrastructure, Yarborough commented
to a dinner in Corpus Christi:
  ``These are the projects, along
with ship channels, dams and
reservoirs, water research programs,
hurricane and flood control programs,
that bring delegations of city
officials, members of county courts,
members of river and watershed
authorities, co-op delegations, into my
office literally by the thousands year
after year for aid, which is always
given, never refused.'' Yarborough went
on: ``While our efforts and
achievements are largely unpublicized
. there is satisfaction beyond
acclaim when a small town without a
water system is enabled to provide its
people for the first time with water
and sewerage ... when the course of a
river is shored up a little to save a
farmer's crops, when a freeway opens up
new avenues of commerce.''@s6 In the
area of oil policy, always vital in
Texas, Yarborough strained to give the
industry everything it could reasonably
expect, and more. Despite this, he was
implacably hated by many business
circles.
  In short, Ralph Yarborough had a
real commitment to racial and economic
justice, and was, all in all, among the
best that the post-New Deal Democratic
Party had to offer. Certainly there
were weaknesses: One of the principal
ones was to veer in the direction of
environmentalism. Here Yarborough was
the prime mover behind the Endangered
Species Act.

  Climbing the Republican
Ladder

  Bush moved to Houston in 1959,
bringing the corporate headquarters of
Zapata Offshore with him. Houston was
by far the biggest city in Texas, a
center of the corporate bureaucracies
of firms doing business in the oil
patch. There was also the Baker and
Botts law firm, which would function in
effect as part of the Bush family
network, since Baker and Botts were the
lawyers who had been handling the
affairs of the Harriman railroad
interests in the Southwest.
  One prominent lawyer in Houston at
the time was {James Baker III,}
a scion of the family enshrined in the
Baker and Botts name, but himself a
partner in another, satellite firm,
because of the so-called anti-nepotism
rule that prevented the children of
Baker and Botts partners from joining
the firm themselves. Soon Bush would be
hob-nobbing with Baker and other
representatives of the Houston
oligarchy, of the Hobby and Cullen
families, at the Petroleum Club and at
garden parties in the hot, humid,
subtropical summers. George, Barbara
and their children moved into a new
home on Briar Drive....
  Before long, Bush became active in
the Harris County Republican Party,
which was in the process of becoming
one of the GOP strongpoints in the
statewide apparatus then being
assembled by Peter O'Donnell, the
Republican state chairman, and his
associate Thad Hutcheson. By now, George
Bush claimed to have become a
millionaire in his own right, and given
his impeccable Wall Street connections,
it was not surprising to find him on
the Harris County GOP finance
committee, a function that he had
undertaken in Midland for the
Eisenhower-Nixon tickets in 1952 and
1956. He was also a member of the
candidates committee.
  In 1962, the Democrats were
preparing to nominate John Connally for
governor, and the Texas GOP under
O'Donnell was able to mount a more
formidable bid than previously for the
state house in Austin. The Republican
candidate was Jack Cox, a party
activist with a right-wing profile.
Bush agreed to serve as the Harris
County co-chairman of the Jack Cox for
Governor finance committee. In the
gubernatorial election of 1962, Cox
received 710,000 votes, a surprisingly
large result. Connally won the
governorship, and it was in that
capacity that he was present in the
Kennedy motorcade in Dallas on November
22, 1963.
  During these years, a significant
influence was exercised in the Texas
GOP by the John Birch Society, which
had grown up during the 1950s through
the leadership and financing of Robert
Welch. Grist for the Birch mill was
abundantly provided by the liberal
Republicanism of the Eisenhower
administration, which counted Prescott
Bush, Nelson Rockefeller, Gordon Gray
and Robert Keith Gray among its most
influential figures. In reaction
against this Wall Street liberalism,
the Birchers offered an ideology of
impotent negative protest based on
self-righteous chauvinism in foreign
affairs and the mystifications of the
free market at home. But they were
highly suspicious of the financier
cliques of lower Manhattan, and to that
extent they had George Bush's number.
  Bush is still complaining about
the indignities he suffered at the
hands of these Birchers, with whom he
was straining to have as much as
possible in common. But he met with
repeated frustration, because his
Eastern Liberal Establishment pedigree
was always there. In his campaign
autobiography, Bush laments that many
Texans thought that {Redbook Magazine,}
published by his father-in-law, Marvin
Pierce of the McCall Corporation, was
an official publication of the
Communist Party.
  Bush recounts a campaign trip with
his aide Roy Goodearle to the Texas
panhandle, during which he was working
a crowd at one of his typical free
food, free beer ``political
barbecues.'' Bush gave one of his palm
cards to a man who conceded that he had
heard of Bush, but quickly added that
he could never support him. Bush
thought this was because he was running
as a Republican. ``But,'' [Bush] then
realized, ``my being a Republican
wasn't the thing bothering the guy. It
was something worse than that.'' Bush's
interlocutor was upset over the fact
that Zapata Offshore had eastern
investors. When Bush whined that all
oil companies had eastern investors,
for such was the nature of the
business, his tormentor pointed out
that one of Bush's main campaign
contributors, a prominent Houston
attorney, was not just a
``sonofabitch,'' but also a member of
the New York Council on Foreign
Relations.
  Bush explains, with the whine in
his larynx in overdrive: ``The lesson
was that in the minds of some voters
the Council on Foreign Relations was
nothing more than a One World tool of
the Communist-Wall Street
internationalist conspiracy, and to
make matters worse, the Houston lawyer
had also worked for President
Eisenhower--a known tool of the
Communists, in the eyes of some John
Birch members.'' Further elucidation is
then added in a footnote: ``A decade
and a half later, running for
President, I ran into some of the same
political types on the campaign trail.
By then, they'd uncovered an
international conspiracy even more
sinister than the Council on Foreign
Relations--the Trilateral Commission, a
group that President Reagan received at
the White House in 1981.''@s7
  This, as we shall see, is a
reference to Lyndon LaRouche's New
Hampshire primary campaign of 1979-80,
which included the exposure of Bush's
membership not just in David
Rockefeller's Trilateral Commission,
but also in Skull and Bones, about
which Bush always refuses to comment.
When Ronald Reagan and other candidates
took up this issue, Bush ended up
losing the New Hampshire primary, and
with it, his best hope of capturing the
presidency in 1980. Bush, in short, has
been aware since the early sixties that
serious attention to his oligarchical
pedigree causes him to lose elections.
His response has been to seek to
declare these very relevant matters off
limits, and to order dirty tricks and
covert operations against those who
persist in making this an issue, most
clearly in the case of LaRouche.
  Part of the influence of the Birch
Society in those days was due to the
support and financing afforded by the
Hunt dynasty of Dallas. In particular,
the fabulously wealthy oilman {H.L.
Hunt,} one of the richest men in
the world, was an avid sponsor of
rightwing propaganda which he put out
under the name of LIFE LINE. On at
least one occasion, Hunt called Bush to
Dallas for a meeting during one of the
latter's Texas political campaigns.
``There's something I'd like to give
you,'' Hunt told Bush. Bush appeared
with remarkable alacrity, and Hunt
engaged him in a long conversation
about many things, but mentioned
neither politics nor money. Finally, as
Bush was getting ready to leave, Hunt
handed him a thick brown envelope. Bush
eagerly opened the envelope in the firm
expectation that it would contain a
large sum in cash. What he found
instead was a thick wad of LIFE LINE
literature for his ideological
reformation.@s8
  It was in this context that George
Bush, mediocre oilman, fortified by his
Wall Street and Skull and Bones
connections, but with almost no visible
qualifications, and scarcely known in
Texas outside of Odessa, Midland and
Houston, decided that he had attained
senatorial caliber. In the Roman
Empire, membership in the Senate was an
hereditary attribute of patrician
family rank. Prescott Bush had left the
Senate in early January of 1963. Before
the year was out, George Bush would
make his claim. As Senator Yarborough
later commented, it would turn out to
be an act of temerity.

  Harris County Chair

  During the spring of 1963, Bush
set about assembling an institutional
base for his campaign. The chosen
vehicle would be the Republican
chairmanship of Harris County, the area
around Houston, a bulwark of the Texas
GOP. Bush had been participating in the
Harris County organization since 1960.
  One Sunday morning, Bush invited
some county Republican activists to his
home on Briar Drive. Present were
{Roy Goodearle,} a young
independent oil man who, before Barbara
Bush appropriated it, was given the
nickname of ``the Silver Fox'' in the
Washington scene. Also present were
Jack Steel, Tom and Nancy Thawley, and
some others.
  Goodearle, presumably acting as
the lawyer for the Bush faction,
addressed the meeting on the dangers
posed by the sectarians of the John
Birch Society to the prospects of the
GOP in Houston and elsewhere. Over
lunch prepared by Barbara Bush,
Goodearle outlined the tactical
situation in the Harris County
organization: A Birchite faction under
the leadership of state senator Walter
Mengdon, although still a minority, was
emerging as a powerful inner-party
opposition against the liberals and
moderates. In the last vote for GOP
county leader, the Birch candidate had
been narrowly defeated. Now, after
three years in office, the more
moderate county chairman, James A.
Bertron, would announce on February 8,
1963 that he could no longer serve as
chairman of the Harris County
Republican Executive Committee. His
resignation, he would state, was
``necessitated by neglect of my
personal business due to my political
activities.''@s9 This was doubtless
very convenient in the light of what
Bush had been planning.
  Bertron was quitting to move to
Florida. In 1961, Bertron had been
attending a Republican fundraising
gathering in Washington, D.C., when he
was accosted by none other than Senator
Prescott Bush. Bush took Bertron aside
and demanded: ``Jimmy, when are you
going to get George involved?''
``Senator, I'm trying,'' Bertron
replied, evidently with some vexation.
``We're all trying.''@s1@s0 In 1961 or
at any other time, it is doubtful that
George Bush could have found his way to
the men's room without the help of a
paid informant sent by Senator Prescott
Bush.
  Goodearle went on to tell the
assembled Republicans that unless a
``strong candidate'' now entered the
race, a Bircher was likely to win the
post of county chairman. But in order
to defeat the well-organized and
zealous Birchers, said Goodearle, an
anti-Bircher would have to undertake a
grueling campaign, touring the county
and making speeches to the Republican
faithful every night for several weeks.
Then, under the urging of Goodearle,
the assembled group turned to Bush:
Could he be prevailed on to put his hat
in the ring? Bush, by his own account,
needed no time to think it over, and
accepted on the spot.
  With that, George and Barbara were
on the road in their first campaign in
what Bush later called ``another
apprenticeship.'' While Barbara busied
herself with needlepoint in order to
stay awake through a speech she had
heard repeatedly, George churned out a
pitch on the virtues of the two-party
system and the advantages of having a
Republican alternative to the
entrenched Houston establishment. In
effect, his platform was the Southern
Strategy {avant la lettre.} Local
observers soon noticed that Barbara
Bush was able to gain acceptance as a
campaign comrade for Republican
volunteers, in addition to being
esteemed as the wealthy candidate's
wife.
  When the vote for county chairman
came, the candidate opposing Bush,
Russell Prior, pulled out of the race
for reasons that have not been
satisfactorily explained, thus
permitting Bush to be elected
unanimously by the executive committee.
Henceforth, winning unopposed has been
Bush's taste in elections: This is how
he was returned to the House for his
second term in 1968, and Bush
propagandists flirted with a similar
approach to the 1992 presidential
contest.
  As chairman, Bush was free to
appoint the officers of the county GOP.
Some of these choices are not without
relevance for the future course of
world history. For the post of party
counsel, Bush appointed William B.
Cassin of Baker and Botts, Shepherd and
Coates law firm. For his assistant
county chairmen, Bush tapped Anthony
Farris, Gene Crossman and Roy
Goodearle; and for executive director,
William R. Simmons.
  Not to be overloooked is the
choice of Anthony J.P. ``Tough Tony''
Farris. He had been a Marine gunner
aboard dive bombers and torpedo bombers
during the war, and had later graduated
from the University of Houston law
school, subsequently setting up a
general law practice in the Sterling
Building in downtown Houston. The ``P''
stood for Perez, and Farris was a
wheelhorse in the Mexican-American
community with the ``Amigos for Bush''
in a number of campaigns. Farris was an
unsuccessful congressional candidate,
but was later rewarded by the Nixon
administration with the post of United
States Attorney in Houston. Then Farris
was elected to the Harris County bench
in 1980. When George Bush's former
business partner and constant crony, J.
Hugh Liedtke of Pennzoil, sued Texaco
for damages in the celebrated Getty Oil
case of 1985, it was Judge ``Tough
Tony'' Farris who presided over most of
the trial and made the key rulings on
the way to the granting of the biggest
damage award in history, an
unbelievable $11,120,976,110.83, all
for the benefit of Bush's good friend
J. Hugh Liedtke.@s1@s2
  ... At the same time that he was
inveighing against extremism, Bush was
dragooning his party apparatus to mount
the Houston Draft Goldwater drive. The
goal of this effort was to procure
100,000 signatures for Goldwater, with
each signer also plunking down a dollar
to fill the GOP coffers. ``An excellent
way for those who support
Goldwater--like me--to make it known,''
opined Chairman George. Bush fostered a
partisan--one might say
vindictive--mood at the county GOP
headquarters: The {Houston Chronicle}
of June 6, 1963 reports that GOP
activists were amusing themselves by
tossing darts at balloons suspended in
front of a photograph of President
Johnson. Bush told the {Chronicle}: ``I
saw the incident and it did not offend
me. It was just a gag.''
  But Bush's pro-Goldwater efforts
were not universally appreciated. In
early July, Craig Peper, the current
chairman of the party finance
committee, stood up in a party
gathering and attacked the leaders of
the Draft Goldwater movement, including
Bush as ``right wing extremists.'' Bush
had not been purging any Birchers, but
he was not willing to permit such
attacks from his left. Bush accordingly
purged Peper, demanding his resignation
after a pro-Goldwater meeting at which
Bush had boasted that he was ``100
percent for the draft Goldwater move.''
  A few weeks after ousting Peper,
Bush contributed one of his first
public political statements as an op ed
in the {Houston Chronicle} of July 28,
1963. Concerning the recent
organizational problems, he whined that
the county organization was ``afflicted
with some dry-martini critics who talk
and don't work.'' Then, in conformity
with his family doctrine and his own
dominant obsession, Bush turned to the
issue of race. As a conservative, he
had to lament that fact that
``Negroes'' ``think that conservatism
means segregation.'' Nothing could be
further from the truth. This was rather
the result of slanderous propaganda
which Republican public relations men
had not sufficiently refuted: ``First,
they attempt to present us as racists.
The Republican party of Harris County
is not a racist party. We have not
presented our story to the Negroes in
the county. Our failure to attract the
Negro voter has not been because of a
racist philosophy; rather, it has been
a product of our not having had the
organization to tackle all parts of the
county.'' What then was the GOP line
on the race question? ``We believe in
the basic premise that the individual
Negro surrenders the very dignity and
freedom he is struggling for when he
accepts money for his vote or when he
goes along with the block vote dictates
of some Democratic boss who couldn't
care less about the quality of the
candidates he is pushing.'' So the GOP
would try to separate the black voter
from the Democrats. Bush conceded: ``We
have a tough row to hoe here.''
  After these pronouncements on
race, Bush then went on to the trade
union front. Yarborough's labor backing
was exceedingly strong, and Bush lost
no time in assailing the state AFL-CIO
and its Committee on Political
Education (COPE) for gearing up to help
Yarborough in his race. For Bush, this
meant that the AFL-CIO was not
supporting the ``two-party system.''
``A strong pitch is being made to dun
the [union] membership to help elect
Yarborough,'' he charged, ``long before
Yarborough's opponent is even known.''
  Bush also spoke out during this
period on foreign affairs. He demanded
that President Kennedy ``muster the
courage'' to undertake a new attack on
Cuba.@s1@s3
  Before announcing his bid for the
senate, Bush decided to take out what
would appear in retrospect to be a very
important insurance policy for his
future political career. On April 22,
Bush, with the support of Republican
state chairman Peter O'Donnell, filed a
suit in federal court, calling for the
reapportionment of the congressional
districts in the Houston area. The suit
argued that the urban voters of Harris
County were being partially
disenfranchised by a system that
favored rural voters, and demanded as a
remedy that a new congressional
district be drawn in the area. ``This
is not a partisan matter,'' commented
the civic-minded Bush. ``This is
something of concern to all Harris
County citizens.'' Bush would later win
this suit, and that would lead to a
court-ordered redistricting, which
would create the Seventh Congressional
District, primarily out of those
precincts which Bush managed to carry
in the 1964 Senate race. Was this the
invisible hand of Skull and Bones? This
would also mean that there would be no
entrenched incumbent, no incumbent of
any kind in that Seventh District, when
Bush got around to making his bid there
in 1966. But for now, this was all
still in the future.

  The Senate Race

  On September 10, 1963, Bush
announced his campaign for the U.S.
Senate. He was fully endorsed by the
state Republican organization and its
chairman, Peter O'Donnell, who,
according to some accounts, had
encouraged Bush to run. By December 5,
Bush had further announced that he was
planning to step down as Harris County
chairman and devote himself to
full-time, statewide campaigning
starting early in 1964.
  At this point, Bush's foremost
strategic concern appears to have been
money--big money. On October 19, the
{Houston Chronicle} carried his comment
that ousting Yarborough would require
nearly $2 million, ``if you want to do
it right.'' Much of this would go to
the Brown and Snyder advertising agency
in Houston for television and
billboards. In 1963, this was a
considerable sum, but Bush's crony C.
Fred Chambers, also an oilman, was
committed to raising it. During these
years, Chambers appears to have been
one of Bush's closest friends, and he
received the ultimate apotheosis of
having one of the Bush family dogs
named in his honor.@s1@s4
  It is impossible to establish in
retrospect how much Bush spent in this
campaign. State campaign finance
filings do exist, but they are
fragmentary and grossly underestimate
the money that was actually committed.
  In terms of the tradeoffs of the
campaign, Bush and his handlers were
confronted with the following
configuration: There were three
competitors for the Republican
senatorial nomination. The most
formidable competition came from Jack
Cox, the Houston oilman who had run for
governor against Connally in 1962, and
whose statewide recognition was much
higher than Bush's. Cox would position
himself to the right of Bush, and would
receive the endorsement of General
Edwin Walker, who had been forced to
resign his infantry command in Germany
because of his radical speeches to the
troops. A former Democrat, Cox was
reported to have financial backing from
the Hunts of Dallas. Cox campaigned
against medicare, federal aid to
education, the war on poverty, and the
loss of U.S. sovereignty to the U.N.
  Competing with Cox was Dr. Milton
Davis, a thoracic surgeon from Dallas,
who was expected to be the weakest
candidate but whose positions were
perhaps the most distinctive: Morris
was for ``no treaties with Russia,''
the repeal of the federal income tax,
and the ``selling off of excess
government industrial property such as
TVA and REA''--what the Reagan-Bush
administrations would later call
privatization.
  Competing with Bush for the less
militant conservatives was Dallas
lawyer Robert Morris, who recommended
depriving the U.S. Supreme Court of
appellate jurisdiction in school prayer
cases.@s1@s5 In order to avoid a
humiliating second-round runoff in the
primary, Bush would need to score an
absolute majority the first time
around. To do that he would have to
first compete with Cox on a right-wing
terrain, and then move to the center
after the primary, in order to take
votes from Yarborough there.
  But there was also primary
competition on the Democratic side for
Yarborough. This was Gordon McLendon,
the owner of a radio network, the
Liberty Broadcasting System, that was
loaded with debt. Liberty
Broadcasting's top creditor was Houston
banker Roy Cullen, a Bush crony. Roy
Cullen's name appears, for example,
along with such died-in-the wool
Bushmen as W.S. Farish III, James A.
Baker III, C. Fred Chambers, Robert
Mosbacher, William C. Liedtke, Jr.,
Joseph R. Neuhaus and William B.
Cassin, in a Bush campaign ad in the
{Houston Chronicle} of late April,
1964. When McLendon finally went
bankrupt, it was found that he owed Roy
Cullen more than a million dollars. So
perhaps it is not surprising that
McLendon's campaign functioned as an
auxiliary to Bush's own efforts.
McLendon specialized in smearing
Yarborough with the Billie Sol Estes
issue, and it was to this that McLendon
devoted most of his speaking time and
media budget.
  Billie Sol Estes in those days was
notorious for his conviction for
defrauding the U.S. government of large
sums of money in a scam involving the
storage of chemicals that turned out
not to exist. Billie Sol was part of
the LBJ political milieu. As the Estes
scandal developed, a report emerged
that he had given Yarborough a payment
of $50,000 on Nov. 6, 1960. But later,
after a thorough investigation, the
Department of Justice had issued a
statement declaring that the charges
involving Yarborough were ``without any
foundation in fact and unsupported by
credible testimony.'' ``The case is
closed,'' said the Justice Department.
But this did not stop Bush from using
the issue to the hilt: ``I don't intend
to mud-sling with [Yarborough] about
such matters as the Billie Sol Estes
case since Yarborough's connections
with Estes are a simple matter of
record which any one can check,'' said
Bush. ``[Yarborough is] going to have
to prove to the Texas voters that his
connections with Billie Sol Estes were
as casual as he claims they
were.''@s1@s6 In a release issued on
April 24, Bush ``said he welcomes the
assistance of Gordon McLendon,
Yarborough's primary opponent, in
trying to force the incumbent Senator
to answer.'' Bush added that he planned
to ``hammer at Yarborough every step of
the way ... until I get some sort of
answer.''
  The other accusation that was used
against Yarborough during the campaign
was advanced most notably in an article
published in the September 1964 issue
of {Reader's Digest.} The story was
that Yarborough had facilitated backing
and subsidies through the Texas Area
Reconstruction Administration for an
industrial development project in
Crockett, Texas, only to have the
project fail owing to the inability of
the company involved to build the
factory that was planned. The
accusation was that Audio Electronics,
the prospective factory builders, had
received a state loan of $383,000 to
build the plant, while townspeople had
raised some $60,000 to buy the plant
site, before the entire deal fell
through.
  The {Reader's Digest} told
disapprovingly of Yarborough addressing
a group of 35 Crockett residents on a
telephone squawk box in March, 1963,
telling them that he was authorized by
the White House to announce ``that you
are going to gain a fine new
industry--one that will provide new
jobs for 180 people, add new strength
to your area.''
  The {Reader's Digest} article left
the distinct impression that the
$60,000 invested by local residents had
been lost. ``Because people believed
that their Senator's `White House
announcment' of the ARA loan to Audio
guaranteed the firm's soundness,
several Texans invested in it and lost
all. One man dropped $40,000. A retired
Air Force officer plowed in $7000.'' It
turned out in reality that those who
had invested in the real estate for the
plant site had lost nothing, but had
rather been made an offer for their
land that represented a profit of
one-third on the original investment,
and thus stood to gain substantially.
  Bush campaign headquarters
immediately got into the act with a
statement that ``it is a shame'' that
Texans had to pick up the {Reader's
Digest} and find their Senator
``holding the hand of scandal....
The citizens of the area raised $60,000 in
cash, invested it in the company, and
lost it because the project was a fraud
and never started.''
  Yarborough shot back with a
statement of his own, pointing out that
Bush's claims were ``basely false,''
and adding that the ``reckless,
irresponsible, false charges by my
opponent further demonstrate his
untruthfulness and unfitness for the
office of U.S. Senator.'' Most telling
was Yarborough's charge on how the
{Reader's Digest} got
interested in Crockett, Texas, in the
first place: ``The fact that my
opponent's multi-millionaire father's
Wall Street investment banking
connections enable the planting of
false and libelous articles about me in
a national magazine like the
{Reader's Digest} will not
enable the Connecticut candidate to buy
a Texas seat in the U.S. Senate.''
(This was not mere rhetoric: {Reader's
Digest General Manager Albert Cole was
Prescott Bush's neighbor and fellow
member of the Harrimans' secret enclave
on Jupiter Island, Florida.)
Yarborough's shot was on target, it
hurt. Bush whined in response that it
was Yarborough's statement which was
``false, libelous, and hogwash,'' and
challenged the Senator to prove it or
retract it.@s1@s7

  Racial Theme

  Beyond these attempts to smear
Yarborough, it is once again
characteristic that the principal issue
around which Bush built his campaign
was racism, expressed this time as
opposition to the civil rights bill
that was before the Congress during
1964. Bush did this certainly in order
to conform to his pro-Goldwater
ideological profile, and in order to
garner votes (especially in the
Republican primary) using racist and
states' rights backlash, but most of
all in order to express the deepest
tenets of the philosophical
world-outlook of himself and his
oligarchical family.
  Very early in the campaign, Bush
issued a statement saying: ``I am
opposed to the Civil Rights bill now
before the Senate.'' Not content with
that, Bush proceeded immediately to tap
the wellsprings of nullification and
interposition: ``Texas has a comparably
good record in civil rights,'' he
argued, ``and I'm opposed to the
Federal Government intervening further
into State affairs and individual
rights.'' At this point Bush claimed
that his quarrel was not with the
entire bill, but rather with two
specific provisions, which he claimed
had not been a part of the original
draft, but which he hinted had been
added to placate violent black
extremists. According to his statement
of March 17, ``Bush pointed out that
the original Kennedy Civil Rights bill
in 1962 did not contain provisions
either for a public accommodations
section or a Fair Employment Practices
Commission (FEPC) section.'' ``Then,
after the hot, turbulent summer of
1962, when it became apparent that in
order to get the Civil Rights leaders'
support and votes in the 1964 election
something more must be done, these two
bad sections were added to the bill,''
according to Bush. ``I suggest that
these two provisions of the bill--which
I most heatedly oppose--were
politically motivated and are cynical
in their approach to a most serious
problem.''
  But Bush soon abandoned this
hair-splitting approach, and on March
25 he told the Jaycees of Tyler, ``I
oppose the entire bill.'' Bush
explained later that beyond the public
accommodations section and the Fair
Employment Practices Committee, he
found that ``the most dangerous
portions of the bill are those which
make the Department of Justice the most
powerful police force in the Nation and
the Attorney General the Nation's most
powerful police chief.''
  When Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts
delivered his maiden speech to the
Senate in April of 1964, he included a
passage referring to the late John F.
Kennedy, saying that the dead President
had believed that ``we should not hate,
but love one another.'' Bush lashed out
at Kennedy for what he called ``unfair
criticism of those who oppose the Civil
Rights bill.'' In Bush's
interpretation, ``Kennedy's dramatic,
almost tearful plea for passage of the
bill presented all those who disagree
with it as hate mongers.'' ``The
inference is clear,'' Bush said. ``In
other words, Ted Kennedy was saying
that any one who opposes the present
Civil Rights bill does so because there
is hate in his heart. Nothing could be
further from the truth. This is not a
question of hate or love, but of
Constitutionality.'' Bush ``and other
responsible conservatives'' simply
think that the bill is politically
inspired. ``This bill,'' Bush said,
``would make further inroads into the
rights of individuals and the States,
and even provide for the ultimate
destruction of our trial by jury
system. We simply feel that this type
of class legislation, based on further
federal control and intervention, is
bad for the nation.'' Bush said ``the
Civil Rights problem is basically a
local problem, best left to the States
to handle.'' Here surely was a
respectable-sounding racism for the era
of Selma and Bull Connor.
  Bush was provided with new
rhetorical ammunition when Alabama
Governor George Wallace ventured into
the presidential primaries of that year
and demonstrated unexpected
vote-getting power in certain northern
states, using a pitch that included
overtly racist appeals. In the wake of
one such result in Wisconsin, the Bush
campaign issued a release quoting the
candidate as being ``sure that a
majority of Americans are opposed to
the Civil Rights bill now being debated
in the Senate.'' ``Bush called
attention to the surprising 25 percent
of the Wisconsin primary vote received
by Governor George C. Wallace of
Alabama,'' said the release. In Bush's
view, ``you can be sure this big vote
was not cast for Wallace himself, but
was used as a means of showing public
opposition to the Civil Rights Bill.''
``If a flamboyant Governor Wallace can
get that kind of a vote in a northern
state such as Wisconsin, it indicates
to me that there must be general
concern from many responsible people
over the Civil Rights bill all over the
nation,'' Bush said in Houston. ``If I
were a member of the Senate today, I
would vote against this bill in its
entirety.''

  Footnotes


5.
For a profile of Yarborough's voting
record on this and other issues, see
Chandler Davidson, {Race and Class
in Texas Politics} (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1990), pp.
29 ff.


6.
For Yarborough's Senate achievements
up to 1964, see Ronnie Dugger, ``The
Substance of the Senate Contest,'' in
{The Texas Observer,} Sept. 18, 1964.


7.
Bush and Gold, {op. cit.,} p. 77
{ff.}


8.
See Harry Hurt III, {Texas Rich}
(New York: Putnam, 1987), p. 191.


9.
On Bush's drive to become Harris
County chairman, it is instructive to
compare his {Looking Forward} with the
clippings from the {Houston Chronicle}
of those days, preserved on microfiche
in the Texas Historical Society in
Houston. Bush says that he decided to
run for the post in the sping of 1962,
but the Houston press clearly situates
the campaign in the spring of 1963.
Bush also claims to have been county
chairman for two years, whereas the
Houston papers show that he served from
February 20, 1963 to around December 5
1963, less than one year.


10.
Harry Hurt III, ``George Bush,
Plucky Lad,'' {Texas Monthly,} June
1983, p. 196....


12.
For Anthony Farris in the Pennzoil
vs. Texaco case, see below and also
Thomas Petzinger, Jr., {Oil and Honor}
(New York: Putnam, 1987), {passim.}


13.
{Boston Globe,} June 12,
1988, cited in Michael R. Beschloss,
{The Crisis Years} (New York:
Edward Burlingame Books, 1991), p. 581.


14.
See Barbara Bush, {C. Fred's Story}
(New York: Doubleday, 1984), p. 2. This
is an example of Mrs. Bush's singular
habit of composing books in which she
speaks through a canine persona, a feat
she has repeated for the current family
pet and public relations ploy, Millie.
In her account of how C. Fred the dog
got his name, George Bush is heard
ruling out usual dog names with the
comment: ``Not at all. We Bushes have
always named our children after people
we loved.'' So, writes C. Fred, ``I am
named after George Bush's best friend,
C. Fred Chambers of Houston, Texas. I
have met him many times and he doesn't
really seem to appreciate the great
honor that the Bushes bestowed upon
him.''


15.
See Ronnie Dugger, ``The Four
Republicans,'' in {The Texas Observer,}
April 17, 1964.


16.
Quotations from Bush and Yarborough
campaign material, except as otherwise
indicated, are from Senator
Yarborough's papers on deposit in the
Eugene C. Barker Texas History Center
at the University of Texas in Austin.


17.
See Ronnie Dugger, ``The Substance
of the Senate Contest,'' in {The Texas
Observer,} Sept. 18, 1964.

----         John Covici
         [email protected]

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