From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici)
Reply-To: covici@ccs.covici.com
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Subject: Unauthorized Biography of George Bush: part 11
Date: 6 Apr 92 8:53:13 GMT
Organization: Covici Computer Systems

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 CHAPTER TEN/Part II 

The Senate Race 

Bush was
described in the Texas press as
attempting a me@aalange of
``Goldwater's policies, Kennedy's
style.''@s1@s8 This coverage reveals
traits of the narcissistic macho in the
40-year old plutocrat: ``He is the sort
of fellow the ladies turn their heads
to see at the country club charity
ball.'' Abundant campaign financing
allowed Bush ``to attract extra people
to rallies with free barbecue, free
drinks, and musical entertainers.''
These were billed by the Bush campaign
as a return to the ``old fashioned
political rally,'' and featured such
musical groups as the Black Mountain
Boys and the Bluebonnet Belles. At
Garcia's Restaurant in Austin, Bush
encountered a group of two dozen or so
sporty young Republican women holding
Bush campaign placards. ``Oh girls!''
crooned the candidate. ``Y'all look
great! You look terrific. All dolled
up.'' The women ``were ga-ga about him
in return,'' wrote political reporter
Ronnie Dugger in the {Texas
Observer,} adding that Bush's
``campaign to become this state's
second Republican senator gets a lot of
energy and sparkle from the young
Republican matrons who are enthusiastic
about him personally and have plenty of
money for baby sitters and nothing much
to do with their time.'' But in
exhortations for militaristic
adventurism abroad, the substance was
indeed pure Goldwater. 
   As could be expected from the man
who had so recently challenged John F.
Kennedy to ``muster the courage'' to
attack Cuba, some of Bush's most
vehement pronouncements concerned
Castro and Havana, and were doubtless
much appreciated by the survivors of
Brigade 2506 and the Miami Cubans. Bush
started off with what passed for a
moderate position in Texas Goldwater
circles: ``I advocate recognition of a
Cuban government in exile and would
encourage this government every way to
reclaim its country. This means
financial and military assistance.''
``I think we should not be found
wanting in courage to help them
liberate their country,'' said Bush.
Candidate Morris had a similar
position, but both Cox and Davis called
for an immediate restoration of the
naval blockade of Cuba. 
   Bush therefore went them one up,
and endorsed a new invasion of Cuba. A
Bush for Senate campaign brochure
depicted a number of newspaper articles
about the candidate. The headline of
one of these, from an unidentified
newspaper, reads as follows:
{``Cuba Invasion Urged by GOP
Candidate.''} The subtitle reads:
``George Bush, Houston oilman,
campaigning for the Republican
nomination to the U.S. Senate called
for a new government-in-exile invasion
of Cuba, no negotiation of the Panama
Canal treaty, and a freedom package in
Austin.'' Other campaign flyers state
that ``Cuba ... under Castro is a
menace to our national security. I
advocate recognition of a Cuban
government in exile and support of this
government to reclaim its country. We
must reaffirm the Monroe Doctrine.''
Another campaign handout characterizes
Cuba as ``an unredeemed diplomatic
disaster abetted by a lack of a firm
Cuban policy.'' 
   What Bush was proposing would have
amounted to a vast and well-funded
program for arming and financing
anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Miami, and
putting the United States government at
the service of their
adventures--presumably far in excess of
the substantial programs that were
already being funded. Beneficiaries
would have included Theodore Shackley,
who was by now the station chief at CIA
Miami station, Felix Rodriguez, Chi Chi
Quintero, and the rest of the boys from
the Enterprise. 
   Bush attacked Senator J. William
Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas, for
the latter's call in a speech for a
more conciliatory policy toward Cuba,
ending the U.S. economic boycott. ``I
view the speech with great suspicion,''
said Bush. ``I feel this is a trial
balloon on the part of the State
Department to see whether the American
people will buy another step in a
disastrous, soft foreign policy.'' Bush
called on Secretary of State Dean Rusk,
a leading hawk, to hold firm against
the policy shift that Fulbright was
proposing. ``Fulbright says Cuba is a
`distasteful nuisance', but I believe
that Castro's Communist regime 90 miles
from our shores is an intolerable
nuisance. I am in favor only of total
liberation of Cuba,'' proclaimed Bush,
``and I believe this can only be
achieved by recognition of a Cuban
government in exile, backed up to the
fullest by the United States and the
Organization of American States.'' 
   In the middle of April, a
Republican policy forum held in Miami
heard a report from a Cuban exile
leader that the Soviets had positioned
missiles on the ocean floor off Cuba,
with the missiles pointed at the United
States, and that this had been
confirmed by diplomatic sources in
Havana. This would appear in retrospect
to have been a planted story. For Bush
it was obvious grist for his campaign
mill. Bush, speaking in Amarillo,
called the report ``the most alarming
news in this hemisphere in two years.''
He called for efforts to ``drive the
Communists out of Cuba.'' 
   But, in keeping with the times,
Bush's most genocidal campaign
statements were made in regard to
Vietnam. Here Bush managed to identify
himself with the war, with its
escalation, and with the use of nuclear
weapons. 
   Senator Goldwater had recently
raised the possibility of using
tactical nuclear weapons as the most
effective defoliants to strip away the
triple canopy jungle of Vietnam. In a
response to this, an Associated Press
story quoted Bush as saying that he was
in favor of anything that could be done
safely toward finishing the fighting in
Southeast Asia. ``Bush said he favors a
limited extension of the war in Viet
Nam, including restricted use of
nuclear weapons if `militarily
prudent,'|'' according to the AP
release.@s1@s9 A Bush campaign release
of June 1 has him saying he favors a
``cautious, judicious, and militarily
sound extension of the war in
Vietnam.'' This was all before the Gulf
of Tonkin incident and well before U.S.
ground troops were committed to
Vietnam. 
   Bush had several other notes to
sound concerning the looming war in
Southeast Asia. In May, he attacked the
State Department for ``dawdling'' in
Vietnam, a policy which he said had
``cost the lives of so many young
Americans.'' He further charged that
the U.S. troops in Vietnam were being
issued ``shoddy war material.''
Responding to a prediction from Defense
Secretary McNamara that the war might
last ten years, Bush retorted: ``This
would not be the case if we had
developed a winning policy from the
start of this dangerous brush fire.''
Also in May, Bush responded to a Pathet
Lao offensive in Laos as follows:
``This should be a warning to us in
Vietnam. Whenever the Communist
world--either Russian or Chinese--sign
a treaty, or any other agreement, with
a nation of the free world, that treaty
isn't worth the paper it's written
on.'' 
   Bush pugnaciously took issue with
those who wanted to disengage from the
Vietnam quagmire before the bulk of the
war's human losses had occurred. He
made this part of his ``Freedom
Package,'' which was a kind of
manifesto for a worldwide U.S.
imperialist and colonialist
offensive--a precursor of the new world
order {ante litteram.} A March
30 campaign release proclaims the
``Freedom Package'' in these terms:
``|`I do not want to continue to live
in a world where there is no hope for a
real and lasting peace,' Bush said. He
decried `withdrawal symptoms'
propounded by U.N. Ambassador Adlai
Stevenson and Senators William
Fulbright and Mike Mansfield. `Adlai
has proposed we [inter]nationalize the
Panama Canal,' Bush pointed out,
`Fulbright asks us to accommodate Red
Cuba and renegotiate our Panama treaty,
and Mansfield suggests we withdraw from
the Viet Nam struggle. This is the kind
of retreatism we have grown accustomed
to among our supposed world leaders and
it is just what the Kremlin
ordered.'|'' 
   Nor did Bush's obsession with
Panama and the Panama Canal begin with
Noriega. In his campaign literature,
Bush printed his basic position that
the ``Panama Canal ... is ours by right
of treaty and historical circumstance.
The Canal is critical to our domestic
security and U.S. sovereignty over the
Canal must be maintained.'' What is
meant by the right of historical
circumstance? ``I am opposed to further
negotiation in Panama,'' Bush stated
repeatedly in his campaign speeches and
releases.... 
  
   Unbridled Free Enterprise
 
   In economic policy, Bush's
starting point was always ``unbridled
free enterprise,'' as he stressed in a
statement on unemployment on March 16:
``Only unbridled free enterprise can
cure unemployment. But, I don't believe
the federal government has given the
private sector of our economy a genuine
opportunity to relieve this
unemployment. For example, the [Johnson
war on poverty program] contains a new
version of the CCC, a Domestic Peace
Corps, and various and sundry
half-baked pies in the sky.'' Bush's
printed campaign literature stated,
under the heading of ``federal
economy,'' that ``the free enterprise
system must be unfettered. A strong
economy means jobs, opportunity, and
prosperity. A controlled economy means
loss of freedom and bureaucratic
bungling.'' On April 21, Bush told the
voters: ``We must begin a phase of
re-emphasizing the private sector of
our economy, instead of the public
sector.'' 
   By April 15, Bush had been
informed that there were some 33
million Americans living in poverty, to
which he replied: ``I cannot see how
draping a socialistic medi-care program
around the sagging neck of our social
security program will be a blow to
poverty. And I can see only one answer
to [the problem of poverty]: Let us
turn our free enterprise system loose
from government control.'' Otherwise,
Bush held it ``the responsibility of
the local government first to assume
the burden of relieving poverty
wherever its exists, and I know of many
communities that are more than capable
of working with this problem.'' 
   Bush's approach to farm policy was
along similar lines, combining the
rhetoric of Adam Smith with
intransigent defense of the food
cartels. In his campaign brochure he
opined that ``Agriculture ... must be
restored to a free market economy,
subject to the basic laws of supply and
demand.'' On April 9 in Waco, Bush
assailed the Wheat-Cotton subsidy bill
which had just received the approval of
the House. ``If I am elected to the
Senate,'' said Bush, I will judge each
agricultural measure on the basis of
whether it gets the Government further
into, or out of, private business.''
Bush added that farm subsidies are
among ``our most expensive federal
programs.'' 
   Another of Bush's recurrent
obsessions was his desire to break the
labor movement. During the 1960s, he
expressed this in the context of
campaigns to prevent the repeal of
section 14 (b) of the Taft-Hartley law,
which permitted the states to outlaw
the closed shop and union shop, and
thus to protect state laws guaranteeing
the so-called open shop or ``right to
work,'' a device which in practice
prevented the organization of large
sectors of the working population of
these states into unions. Bush's
editorializing takes him back to the
era when the Sherman Antitrust Act was
still being used against labor unions. 
   ``I believe in the right-to-work
laws,'' said Bush to a group of
prominent Austin businessmen at a
luncheon in the Commodore Perry Hotel
on March 5. ``At every opportunity, I
urge union members to resist payment of
political assessments. If there's only
one in 100 who thinks for himself and
votes for himself, then he should not
be assessed by COPE.'' 
   On March 19, Bush asserted that
``labor's blatant attack on
right-to-work laws is open admission
that labor does have a monopoly and
will take any step to make this
monopoly. Union demands are a direct
cause of the inflationary spiral
lowering the real income of workers and
increasing the costs of production.''
This is, from the point of scientific
economics, an absurdity. But four days
later Bush returned to the topic,
attacking United Auto Workers President
Walter Reuther, a figure whom Bush
repeatedly sought to identify with
Yarborough, for demands which ``will
only cause the extinction of free
enterprise in America. A perfect
example of labor's pricing a product
out of existence is found in West
Virginia. John L. Lewis's excessive
demands on the coal industry raised the
price of coal, forced the consumer to
use a substitute cheaper product,
killed the coal industry and now West
Virginia has an excessive rate of
unemployment.'' 
   On Labor Day, Bush spoke to a
rally in the courthouse square of
Quanah, and called for ``protection of
the rights of the individual laborer
through the state rather than the
federal government. The individual
laboring man is being forgotten by the
Walter Reuthers and Ralph Yarboroughs,
and it's up to the business community
to protect our country's valuable labor
resources from exploitation by these
left-wing labor leaders,'' said Bush,
who might just as well have suggested
that the fox be allowed to guard the
chicken coop. 
   East Texas was an area of
unusually high racial tension, and Bush
spent most of his time there attacking
the civil rights bill. But the alliance
between Yarborough and big labor was
one of his favorite themes. The
standard pitch went something like
this, as before the Austin businessmen.
Yarborough, he would start off saying,
``more nearly represents the state of
Michigan than he does Texas.'' This, as
we will see, was partly an attempted,
lame rebuttal of Yarborough's charge
that Bush was a northeastern
carpetbagger. Bush would then continue:
``One of the main reasons Yarborough
represents Texas so badly is that he's
spending most of his time representing
labor interests in Detroit. His voting
record makes men like Walter Reuther
and James Hoffa very happy. This man
has voted for every special interest
bill, for every big spending measure
that's come to his attention.'' 
   During this period Camco, an
oilfield equipment company of which
Bush was a director, was embroiled in
some bitter labor disputes. The
regional office of the National Labor
Relations Board sought a federal
injunction against Camco in order to
force the firm to re-hire four union
organizers who had been illegally
fired. Officials of the Machinists
Union, which was trying to organize
Camco, also accused Bush of being
complicit in what they said was Camco's
illegal failure to carry out a 1962
NLRB order directing Camco to re-hire
11 workers, fired because they had
attended a union meeting. Bush answered
that he was not going to be intimidated
by labor. ``As everybody knows, the
union bosses are all-out for Sen. Ralph
Yarborough,'' countered Bush, and he
had been too busy with Zapata to pay
attention to Camco anyway.@s2@s0
According to Roy Evans, the
secretary-treasurer of the Texas
AFL-CIO, Bush was ``a member of the
dinosaur wing of the Republican
Party.'' Evans called Bush ``the
Houston throwback,'' and maintained
that Bush had ``lost touch with anyone
in Texas except the radicals of the
right.'' 
   Back in February, Yarborough had
remarked in his typical populist vein
that his legislative approach was to
``put the jam on the lower shelf so the
little man can get his hand in.'' This
scandalized Bush, who countered on
February 27 that ``it's a cynical
attitude and one that tends to set the
so-called little man apart from the
rest of his countrymen.'' For Bush, the
jam would always remain under lock and
key, except for the chosen few of Wall
Street. A few days later, on March 5,
Bush elaborated that he was ``opposed
to special interest legislation because
it tends to hyphenate Americans. I
don't think we can afford to have
veteran-Americans, Negro-Americans,
Latin-Americans and labor-Americans
these days.'' Here is Bush as political
philosopher, maintaining that the power
of the authoritarian state must
confront its citizens in a wholly
atomized form, not organized into
interest groups capable of defending
themselves. 
   Bush was especially irate about
Yarborough's Cold War G.I. Bill, which
he branded the Senator's ``pet
project.'' ``Fortunately,'' said Bush,
``he has been unable to cram his Cold
War G.I. Bill down Congress' throat.
It's bad legislation and special
interest legislation which will erode
our American way of life. I have four
sons, and I'd sure hate to think that
any of them would measure their
devotion and service to their country
by what special benefits Uncle Sam
could give them.'' Neil Bush would
certainly never do that! Anyway, the
Cold War G.I. Bill was nothing but a
``cynical effort to get votes,'' Bush
concluded. 
                             
   The Oil Cartel's
Candidate
 
   There was a soft spot in Bush's
heart for at least a few special
interests, however. He was a devoted
supporter of the ``time-proven'' 27.5
percent oil depletion allowance, a tax
write-off which allowed the seven
sisters oil cartel to escape a
significant portion of what they
otherwise would have paid in taxes.
Public pressure to reduce this
allowance was increasing, and the oil
cartel was preparing to concede a minor
adjustment, in the hope that this would
neutralize attempts to get the
depletion allowance abolished entirely.
Bush also called for what he described
as a ``meaningful oil import program,
one which would restrict imports at a
level that will not be harmful to our
domestic oil industry.'' ``I know what
it is to earn a paycheck in the oil
business,'' he boasted. Bush also told
Texas farmers that he wanted to limit
the imports of foreign beef so as to
protect their domestic markets. 
   Yarborough's counterattack on this
issue is of great relevance to
understanding why Bush was so
fanatically committed to wage war in
the Gulf to restore the degenerate,
slaveholding Emir of Kuwait. Yarborough
pointed out that Bush's company, Zapata
Offshore, was drilling for oil in
Kuwait, the Persian Gulf, Borneo, and
Trinidad. ``Every producing oil well
drilled in foreign countries by
American companies means more cheap
foreign oil in American ports, fewer
acres of Texas land under oil and gas
lease, less income to Texas farmers and
ranchers,'' Yarborough stated. ``This
issue is clear-cut in this campaign--a
Democratic senator who is fighting for
the life of the free enterprise system
as exemplified by the independent oil
and gas producers in Texas, and a
Republican candidate who is the
contractual driller for the
international oil cartel.'' 
   In those days, the oil cartel did
not deal mildly with those who attacked
it in public. One thinks again of the
Italian oilman Enrico Mattei. For Bush,
these cartel interests would always be
sacrosanct. On April 1, Bush talked of
the geopolitics of oil: ``I was in
London at the time of the Suez crisis
and I quickly saw how the rest of the
free world can become completely
dependent on American oil. When the
Canal was shut down, free nations all
over the world immediately started
crying for Texas oil.'' 
   Later in the campaign, Yarborough
visited the town of Gladewater in East
Texas. There, standing in view of the
oil derricks, Yarborough talked about
Bush's ownership of Pennzoil stock, and
about Pennzoil's quota of 1,690 barrels
per day of imported oil, charging that
Bush was undermining the Texas
producers by importing cheap foreign
oil. 
   Then, according to a newspaper
account, ``the senator spiced his
charge with a reference to the `Sheik
of Kuwait and his four wives and 100
concubines,' who, he said, are living
in luxury off the oil from Bush-drilled
wells in the Persian Gulf and sold at
cut-rate prices in the United States.
He said that imported oil sells for
$1.25 a barrel while Texas oil, selling
at $3, pays school, city, county, and
federal taxes and keeps payrolls going.
Yarborough began his day of campaigning
at a breakfast with supporters in
Longview. Later, in Gladewater, he said
he had seen a `Bush for Senator' bumper
sticker on a car in Longview. `Isn't
that a come-down for an East Texan to
be a strap-hanger for a carpetbagger
from Connecticut who is drilling oil
for the Sheik of Kuwait to help keep
that harem going?'|''@s2@s1 
   Yarborough challenged Bush
repeatedly to release more details
about his overseas drilling and
producing interests. He spoke of Bush's
``S.A. corporations drilling in the
Persian Gulf in Asia.'' He charged that
Bush had ``gone to Latin America to
incorporate two of his companies to
drill in the Far East, instead of
incorporating them in the United
States.'' That in turn, thought
Yarborough, ``raises questions of tax
avoidance.'' ``Tell them, George,'' he
jeered, ``what your `S.A.' companies,
financed with American dollars,
American capital, American resources,
are doing about American income
taxes.'' Bush protested that ``every
single tax dollar due by any company
that I own an interest in has been
paid.''@s2@s2 

   Forced into a Runoff
 
   As the Republican senatorial
primary approached, Bush declared that
he was confident that he could win an
absolute majority and avoid a runoff.
On April 30, he predicted that Hill
Rise would win the Kentucky Derby
without a runoff, and that he would
also carry the day on the first round.
There was no runoff in the Kentucky
Derby, but Bush fell short of his goal.
Bush did come in first with about 44
percent of the vote or 62,579 votes,
while Jack Cox was second with 44,079,
with Morris third and Davis fourth. The
total number of votes cast was 142,961,
so a second round was required. 
   Cox, who had attracted 710,000
votes in his 1962 race against Connally
for the governorship, was at this point
far better known around the state than
Bush. Cox had the backing of Gen. Edwin
Walker, who had made a bid for the
Democratic gubernatorial nomination in
1962 himself and gotten some 138,000
votes. Cox also had the backing of H.L.
Hunt. 
   Morris had carried Dallas County,
and he urged his supporters to vote
against Bush. Morris told the
{Dallas Morning News} of May 5
that Bush was ``too liberal'' and that
Bush's strength in the primary was due
to ``liberal'' Republican support. 
   Between early May and the runoff
election of June 6, Cox mounted a
vigorous campaign of denunciation and
exposure of Bush as a creature of the
Eastern Liberal Establishment, Wall
Street banking interests, and of
Goldwater's principal antagonist for
the GOP presidential nomination, the
hated Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New
York. According to a story filed by
Stuart Long of the Long News Service in
Austin on May 25, and preserved among
the Yarborough papers in the Barker
Texas History Center in Austin, Cox's
supporters circulated letters pointing
to Prescott Bush's role as a partner in
Brown Brothers Harriman as the basis
for the charge that George Bush was the
tool of ``Liberal Eastern Kingmakers.''
According to Long, the letters also
include references to the New York
Council on Foreign Relations, which he
described as a ``black-tie dinner
group.''@s2@s3 The pro-Cox letters also
asserted that Bush's Zapata Offshore
Company had a history of bidding on
drilling contracts for Rockefeller's
Standard Oil of New Jersey. 
   One anti-Bush brochure, preserved
among the Yarborough papers at the
Barker Center in Austin, is entitled
``Who's Behind the Bush?'' published by
the Coalition of Conservatives to Beat
the Bushes, with one Harold Deyo of
Dallas listed as chairman. The attack
on Bush here centers on the Council on
Foreign Relations, of which Bush was
not at that time a public member. The
brochure lists a number of Bush
campaign contributors and then
identifies these as members of the CFR.
These include Dillon Anderson and J.C.
Hutcheson III of Baker and Botts,
Andrews and Shepherd; Leland Anderson
of Anderson, Clayton and Company;
Lawrence S. Reed of Texas Gulf
Producing; Frank Michaux; and W.A.
Kirkland of the board of First City
National Bank. The brochure then
focuses on Prescott Bush, identified as
a ``partner with Averell Harriman in
Brown Brothers, Harriman, and
Company.'' Averell Harriman is listed
as a member of the Council on Foreign
Relations. ``Could it be that Prescott
S. Bush, in concert with his Eastern
CFR friends, is raising all those
`Yankee Dollars' that are flowing into
George's campaign? It is reliably
reported that Mr. George Bush has
contracted for extensive and expensive
television time for the last week of
the Runoff.'' The brochure also targets
Paul Kayser of Anderson, Clayton,
Bush's Harris County campaign chairman.
Five officers of this company, named as
W.L. Clayton, L. Fleming, Maurice
McAshan, Leland Anderson and Sydnor
Oden, are said to be members of the
CFR. 
   On the CFR itself, the brochure
quotes from Helen P. Lasell's study,
entitled ``Power Behind Government
Today,'' which found that the CFR
``from its inception has had an
important part in planning the whole
diabolical scheme of creating a ONE
WORLD FEDERATION of socialist states
under the United Nations.... These
carefully worked out, detailed plans,
in connection with the WORLD BANK and
the use of billions of tax-exempt
foundation dollars, were carried out
secretively over a period of years.
Their fruition could mean not only the
absolute destruction of our form of
government, national independence and
sovereignty, but to a degree at least,
that of every nation in the world.''
The New World Order, we see, is really
nothing new. The brochure further
accuses one Mrs. M. S. Acherman, a
leading Bush supporter in Houston, of
having promoted a write-in campaign for
liberal, Boston Brahmin former Senator
Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts in
the Texas presidential primary. Lodge
had won the 1964 New Hampshire primary,
prompting Bush to announce that this
was merely a regional phenomenon and
that he was ``still for Goldwater.'' 
   As the runoff vote approached, Cox
focused especially on the eastern
financing that Bush was receiving. On
May 25 in Abilene, Cox assailed Bush
for having mounted ``one of the
greatest spending sprees ever seen in
any political campaign.'' Cox said that
he could not hope to match this
funding, ``because Jack Cox is not, nor
will ever be, connected in any manner
with the Eastern kingmakers who seek to
control political candidates.
Conservatives of Texas will serve
notice on June 6 that just as surely as
Rockefeller's millions can't buy
presidential nomination, the millions
at George Bush's disposal can't buy him
a senate nomination.'' Cox claimed that
all of his contributions had come from
inside Texas. 
   O'Donnell's Texas Republican
organization was overwhelmingly
mobilized in favor of Bush. Bush had
the endorsement of the state's leading
newspapers. When the runoff finally
came, Bush was the winner with some 62
percent of the votes cast. Yarborough
commented that Bush ``smothered Jack
Cox in greenbacks.'' 
   Gordon McLendon, true to form, had
used his own pre-primary television
broadcast to rehash the Billie Sol
Estes charges against Yarborough.
Yarborough nevertheless defeated
McLendon in the Democratic senatorial
primary with almost 57 percent of the
vote. Given the lopsided Texas
Democratic advantage in registered
voters, and given LBJ's imposing lead
over Goldwater at the top of the
Democratic ticket, it might have
appeared that Yarborough's victory was
now a foregone conclusion. That this
was not so was due to the internal
divisions within the Texas Democratic
ranks. 

   Senate Seat Can't Be
Bought
 
   First were the Democrats who came
out openly for Bush. The vehicle for
this defection was called Conservative
Democrats for Bush, chaired by Ed
Drake, the former leader of the state's
Democrats for Eisenhower in 1952. Drake
was joined by former Governor Allan
Shivers, who had also backed Ike and
Dick in 1952 and 1956. Then there was
the ``East Texas Democrats for George
Bush Committee,'' chaired by E.B.
Germany, the former state Democratic
leader, a leader of Scottish Rite
Freemasons in Texas and in 1964 the
chairman of the board of Lone Star
Steel. 
   Then there were various forms of
covert support for Bush. Millionaire
Houston oil man Lloyd Bentsen, who had
been in Congress back in the late
1940s, had been in discussion as a
possible Senate candidate. Bush's basic
contention was that LBJ had interfered
in Texas politics to tell Bentsen to
stay out of the Senate race, thus
avoiding a more formidable primary
challenge to Yarborough. On April 24,
Bush stated that Bentsen was a ``good
conservative'' who had been kept out of
the race by ``Yarborough's bleeding
heart act.'' This and other indications
point to a covert political entente
between Bush and Bentsen, which
reappeared during the 1988 presidential
campaign. 
   Then there were the forces
associated with Governor ``Big John''
Connally. Yarborough later confided
that Connally had done everything in
his power to wreck his campaign,
subject only to certain restraints
imposed by LBJ. Even these limitations
did not amount to real support for
Yarborough on the part of LBJ, but were
rather attributable to LBJ's desire to
avoid the embarrassment of seeing his
native state represented by two
Republican senators during his own
tenure in the White House. But Connally
still sabotaged Yarborough as much as
LBJ would let him get away with.@s2@s4 
   Bush and Connally have had a
complex political relationship, with
points of convergence and many points
of divergence. Back in 1956, a lobbyist
working for Texas oilman Sid Richardson
had threatened to ``run [Bush's] ass
out of the offshore drilling business''
unless Prescott Bush voted for gas
deregulation in the Senate.@s2@s5
Connally later became the trustee for
some of Richardson's interests. While
visiting Dallas on March 19, Bush
issued a statement saying that he
agreed with Connally in his criticisms
of attorney Melvin Belli, who had
condemned the District Court in Dallas
when his client, Jack Ruby, was given
the death sentence for having slain Lee
Harvey Oswald the previous November. 
   In public, LBJ was for Yarborough,
although he could not wholly pass over
the frictions between the two. Speaking
at Stonewall after the Democratic
national convention, LBJ had commented:
``You have heard and you have read that
Sen. Yarborough and I have had
differences at times. I have read a
good deal more about them than I was
ever aware of. But I do want to say
this, that I don't think that Texas has
had a senator during my lifetime whose
record I am more familiar with than
Sen. Yarborough's. And I don't think
Texas has had a senator that voted for
the people more than Sen. Yarborough
has voted for them. And no member of
the U.S. Senate has stood up and fought
for me or fought for the people more
since I became President than Ralph
Yarborough.'' For his part, Bush, years
later, quoted a {Time} magazine
analysis of the 1964 senate race which
concluded that ``if Lyndon would stay
out of it, Republican Bush would have a
chance. But Johnson is not about to
stay out of it, which makes Bush the
underdog.''@s2@s6 
   Yarborough, for his part, had
referred to LBJ as a ``power-mad Texas
politician,'' and had called on
President Kennedy to keep LBJ out of
Texas politics. Yarborough's attacks on
Connally were even more explicit and
colorful: He accused Connally of acting
like a ``viceroy, and we got rid of
those in Texas when Mexico took over
from Spain.'' According to Yarborough,
``Texas had not had a progressive
governor since Jimmy Allred,'' who had
held office from 1935 to 1939. Bush
took pains to spell out that this was
an attack on Democrats W. Lee O'Daniel,
Coke Stevenson, Buford H. Jester, Allan
Shivers, Price Daniel, and John
Connally. 
   Yarborough also criticized the
right-wing oligarchs of the Dallas area
for having transformed that city from a
democratic town to a ``citadel of
reaction.'' For Yarborough, the
{Fort Worth Star-Telegram} was
``worse than Pravda.'' 
   Yarborough's strategy in the
November election centered on
identifying Bush with Goldwater in the
minds of voters, since the Arizona
Republican's warlike rhetoric was now
dragging him down to certain defeat.
Yarborough's first instinct had been to
run a substantive campaign, stressing
issues and his own legislative
accomplishments. Yarborough in 1988
told Bush biographer Fitzhugh Green:
``When I started my campaign for
re-election I was touting my record of
six years in the Senate. But my speech
advisers said, all you have to do is
quote Bush, who had already called
himself 100 per cent for Goldwater and
the Vietnam war. So that's what I did,
and it worked very well.''@s2@s7 
   Campaigning in Port Arthur on
October 30, a part of the state where
his labor support loomed large,
Yarborough repeatedly attacked Bush as
``more extreme than Barry Goldwater.''
According to Yarborough, even after
Barry Goldwater had repudiated the
support of the John Birch Society, Bush
said that he ``welcomed support of the
Birch Society and embraced it.''
``Let's you elect a senator from Texas,
and not the Connecticut investment
bankers with their $2,500,000,''
Yarborough urged the voters.@s2@s8 
   These attacks were highly
effective, and Bush's response was to
mobilize his media budget for more
screenings of his World War II ``Flight
of the Avenger'' television spot, while
he prepared a last-minute television
dirty trick. There was to be no debate
between Bush and Yarborough, but this
did not prevent Bush from staging a
televised ``empty chair'' debate, which
was aired on more than a dozen stations
around the state on October 27. The
Bush campaign staff scripted a debate
in which Bush answered doctored quotes
from audio tapes of Yarborough
speaking, with the sentences often cut
in half, taken out of context, and
otherwise distorted. Yarborough
responded by saying: ``The sneaky trick
my opponent is trying to pull on me
tonight of pulling sentences of mine
out of context with my recorded voice
and playing my voice as a part of his
broadcast is illegal under the law, and
a discredit to anyone who aspires to be
a U.S. Senator. I intend to protest
this illegal trick to the Federal
Communications Commission.'' Bush's
method was to ``cut my statements in
half, then let his Madison Avenue
speech writers answer those single
sentences.... My opponent is an
exponent of extremism, peddling smear
and fear wherever he goes.... His
conduct looks more like John Birch
Society conduct than United States
Senate conduct,'' Yarborough added.
Bush also distorted the sound of
Yarborough's voice almost beyond
recognition. 
   Yarborough protested to the FCC in
Washington, alleging that Bush had
violated section 315 of the Federal
Communications Act as it then stood,
because Yarborough's remarks were
pre-censored and used without his
permission. Yarborough also accused
Bush of violation of section 325 of the
same act, since it appeared that parts
of the ``empty chair'' broadcast were
material that had been previously
broadcast elsewhere, and which could
not be re-used without permission. The
FCC responded by saying that the tapes
used had been made in halls where
Yarborough was speaking. 
   All during the campaign,
Yarborough had been talking about the
dangers of electronic eavesdropping. He
had pointed out that ``anybody can be
an eavesdropper, a wiretapper, a
bugger, who has a few dollars for the
cheaper devices on the market. Tiny
recorders and microphones are now made
to resemble lapel buttons or tie
clasps.... Recorders can also be found
the size of a book or a cigarette pack.
There is a briefcase available with a
microphone built into the lock, and
many available recorders may be carried
in briefcases, while the wrist-watch
microphone is no longer a product used
by Dick Tracy--it can actually be
bought for $37.50.'' Yarborough charged
during the primary campaign period that
his Washington office had been
wiretapped, and years later indicated
that the CIA had been bugging all of
Capitol Hill during those years.@s2@s9
Had the James McCords or other plumbers
been lending Bush a hand? 
   Bush was also smarting under
Yarborough's repeated references to his
New England birth and background. Bush
claimed that he was no carpetbagger,
but a Texan by choice, and compared
himself in that regard to Sam Rayburn,
Sam Houston, Stephen Austin, Colonel
Bill Travis, Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie
and other heroes of the Alamo. Bush was
not hobbled by any false modesty. At
least, Bush asserted lamely, he was not
as big a carpetbagger as Bobby Kennedy,
who could not even vote in New York
State, where he was making a successful
bid for election to the Senate. It
``depends on whose bag is being
carpeted,'' Bush whined. 
   In the last days of the campaign,
Allan Duckworth of the pro-Bush
{Dallas Morning News} was
trying to convince his readers that the
race was heading for a ``photo
finish.'' But in the end, Prescott's
networks, the millions of dollars, the
recordings, and the endorsements of 36
newspapers were of no avail for Bush.
Yarborough defeated Bush by a margin of
1,463,958 to 1,134,337. Within the
context of the LBJ landslide victory
over Goldwater, Bush had done somewhat
better than his party's standard
bearer: LBJ beat Goldwater in Texas by
1,663,185 to 958,566. Yarborough,
thanks in part to his vote in favor of
the Civil Rights Act, won a strong
majority of the black districts, and
also ran well ahead among Latinos. Bush
won the usual Republican counties,
including the pockets of GOP support in
the Houston area. 
   Yarborough would continue for one
more term in the Senate, vocally
opposing the war in Vietnam. In the
closing days of the campaign he had
spoken of Bush and his retinue as
harbingers of a ``time and society when
nobody speaks for the working man.''
George Bush, defeated though he was,
would now redouble his struggle to make
such a world a reality. 

    Footnotes
 18.
 See
``The Historic Texas Senate Race,'' in
{The Texas Observer,} Oct. 30,
1964.
 

19.
 Cited in Ronnie Dugger, {op.
cit.}
 

20.
 {Ibid.}
 

21.
 {Dallas News,} Oct. 24,
1964.
 
  
22.
 {Dallas News,} Oct. 3,
1964.
 

23.
 An untitled report among the
Yarborough papers in the Barker Texas
History Center refers to ``Senator
Bush's affiliation in a New York
knife-and-fork-club type of
organization called, `The Council on
Foreign Relations.' In a general
smear--mainly via the `I happen to
know' letter chain of
communication--the elder Bush was
frequently attacked, and the younger
Bushes were greatly relieved when Barry
Goldwater volunteered words of
affectionate praise for his former
colleague during a $100-a-plate Dallas
dinner.''
 

24.
 Just how far these efforts might
have gone is a matter of speculation.
Douglas Caddy in his book, {The
Hundred Million Dollar Payoff} (New
Rochelle), p. 300, reprints an internal
memorandum of the Machinists
Non-Partisan Political League which
expresses alarm about the election
outlook for Yarborough, who is
described as ``the last stand-up
Democratic liberal we have in the
South.'' The memo, from Jack O'Brien to
A.J. Hayes, is dated October 27, 1964,
and cites reports from various labor
operatives to the effect that ``the
`fix is in' to defeat Ralph Yarborough
and to replace him with a Republican,
Bush, the son of Prescott Bush of
Connecticut. The only question at issue
is whether this `fix' is a product of
Governor Connally alone or is the
product of a joint effort between
Connally and President Johnson.''
According to the memo, ``Walter Reuther
called Lyndon Johnson to express his
concern with the failure to invite Mrs.
Yarborough to accompany'' LBJ's plane
through Texas. Labor leaders were
trying to help raise money for
last-minute television broadcasts by
Yarborough, and also to extract more
vocal support for the senator from
LBJ.
 

25.
 See Bush and Gold, {op.
cit.,} p. 82.
 

26.
 {Ibid.,} p. 87.
 

27.
 Fitzhugh Green, {George
Bush: An Intimate Portrait} (New
York: Hippocrene Books, 1989), p.
85.
 

28.
 {Dallas News,} Oct. 31,
1964.
 

29.
 Ronnie Dugger, ``Goldwater's
Policies, Kennedy's Style'' in
{Texas Observer,} Oct. 30,
1964.
 



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Newsgroups: alt.activism,talk.politics.misc