Cheered by Prescott’s news, Bemiss, a conservative southern Democrat who met the Bushes while summering at Kennebunkport, sent a campaign contribution to George and mentioned his son Gerry’s campaign for the Virginia Senate: “The important issues seem . . . the poll tax and hatred of the Kennedys. We want to retain the poll tax [to keep poor blacks from registering to vote] but would be glad to see the Kennedys go back to Ireland.”
George took a similar stand in his own campaign. He ran hard against civil rights during a time when antiblack violence had inflamed passions throughout the South and the North. In June 1963, President Kennedy addressed the nation in a heartfelt appeal on behalf of civil rights as a moral cause. In one of the best speeches of his life, the President called upon the country to honor its finest traditions:
We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities . . . One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free . . . Now the time has come for this Nation to fulfill its promise . . . the fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South, where legal remedies are not at hand . . . A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all . . . Next week I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.
The day after the President’s speech Medgar Evers, a black activist from Mississippi and a World War II veteran of the D-day invasion, was assassinated by a rifle shot in the back as he walked toward his wife and children.
Against that tragic background, on June 19, 1963, the President sent to Congress the most far-reaching civil rights bill in the country’s history. To demonstrate a mandate for the legislation, Martin Luther King Jr. led 250,000 people to Washington, D.C., that summer. He stood at the feet of Abraham Lincoln at the memorial of the Great Emancipator and filled the air with the incandescent rhetoric of his “I Have a Dream” speech.
“As television beamed the image of this extraordinary gathering across the border oceans,” King later recalled, “everyone who believed in man’s capacity to better himself had a moment of inspiration and confidence in the future of the human race.”
Campaigning in Texas, George Bush ignored Martin Luther King Jr. and vigorously opposed President Kennedy and his civil rights bill at every turn.
“I am against the Civil Rights bill on the grounds that it transcends civil rights and violates the constitutional rights of all the people,” Bush said. “Job opportunity, education and fair play will help alleviate inequities. Sweeping federal legislation will fail.
“I am opposed to the public accommodation section. I still favor the problem being handled by moral persuasion at the local level.”
Determined to campaign in each of Texas’s 247 counties, George inveighed against the civil rights bill at every stop. He also charged that “a liberal left-wing radical like Ralph Yarborough,” the state’s senior senator, would be the first in line to vote for it.
“I think most Texans share my opposition to this legislation,” Bush told five hundred women at the Dallas Country Club, which was restricted to whites only. “And Yarborough’s consistent voting record shows utter disregard for the wishes of his constituents.”
Yarborough, like George’s father, had voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1957. In fact, Prescott had supported the strongest (unpassable) version of the 1957 civil rights bill; he also supported the 1960 Civil Rights Act, and he supported every civil rights amendment offered to any bill in 1961 and 1962—and even put forth several such amendments himself. Yet there is nothing in documents released to date that indicates Prescott’s personal views concerning his son’s lack of commitment to civil rights in 1964 or his campaign tactics. In later years, George’s mother expressed her dismay and disapproval, but in 1964 there is nothing to suggest that his father showed any concern or offered any advice. Whenever Prescott mentions the campaign in a letter, he simply says he is excited about the prospect of George’s winning. When George loses, his father says “the lad” has nothing to be ashamed of.
Prescott was a Republican who presumably could hold his nose and support Republicans of many stripes, his own son included, just as Democrats for years had supported southerners with opposing views. While Prescott attacked southern Democrats in public when civil rights bills rolled around, the rest of the time he managed to maintain strong friendships with Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas and Samuel Bemiss of Virginia, both of whom held racist views.
On November 22, 1963, George and Barbara headed for Tyler, Texas (population thirty-five thousand), where he was scheduled for a luncheon speech to the Kiwanis Club, a group of one hundred men, meeting at the Blackstone Hotel.
“I remember it was a beautiful fall day,” recalled Aubrey Irby, the former Kiwanis vice president. “George had just started to give his speech when Smitty, the head bellhop, tapped me on the shoulder to say that President Kennedy had been shot. I gave the news to the president of the club, Wendell Cherry, and he leaned over to tell George that wires from Dallas confirmed President Kennedy had been assassinated.
“George stopped his speech and told the audience what had happened. ‘In view of the President’s death,’ he said, ‘I consider it inappropriate to continue with a political speech at this time. Thank you very much for your attention.’ Then he sat down.
“I thought that was rather magnanimous of him to say and then to sit down, but I’m a Republican, of course, and I was all for George Bush. Kennedy, who was bigger than life then, represented extremely opposite views from Bush on everything.”
The luncheon meeting adjourned, and George hurried across the street to meet Barbara at the beauty salon for their scheduled flight to Dallas. Before leaving the city, George called the FBI in Houston. Files obtained under the Freedom of Information Act document George’s 1:45 p.m. call to the Houston field office: “Bush stated that he wanted to be kept confidential but wanted to furnish hearsay that he recalled hearing in recent days . . . He stated that one James Milton Parrott has been talking of killing the President when he comes to Houston.”
The man George turned in was an unemployed twenty-four-year-old who had been honorably discharged from the Air Force upon the recommendation of a psychiatrist. He was also a John Bircher who had vigorously opposed George during Bush’s campaign for GOP chairman of Harris County. During his interview with the FBI, Parrott said he was a member of the Texas Young Republicans and had been active in picketing members of the Kennedy administration but that he had not threatened the President’s life.
Years later, when he was running for President, George would claim that he never made the call. Documents were then produced that refreshed his memory. He also claimed that he did not remember where he was the day John F. Kennedy was killed—“somewhere in Texas,” he said. George Bush is possibly the only person on the planet who did not recall his whereabouts on that day, although his wife clearly remembered their being in Tyler. She said that at the time of the assassination she was writing a letter in the beauty salon and that they left shortly after hearing the news. They flew to Dallas en route to Houston, and in Dallas they had to circle Love Field several times while the second presidential plane was taking off to return to Washington, D.C.
“The rumors are flying about that horrid assassin,” Barbara wrote in her letter. “We are hoping that it is not some far right nut, but a ‘commie’ nut. You understand that we know they are both nuts, but just hope that it is not a Texan and not an American at all.”
George and the three other candidates vying for the GOP Senate nomination suspended campaigning for several weeks but resumed after the first of the year.
On January 1, 1964, George issued a campaign biography that trumpeted his military career: “He was shot down in combat, during action which added the Distinguished Flying Cross to his three Air Medals.” Ten years earlier, perhaps with an eye to his political future, George had written to the Navy requesting the three Air Medals on the basis of the number of missions he had flown in the Pacific theater during World War II. The Navy confirmed from records that George had indeed flown the requisite number of missions and awarded him his three Air Medals. Legare Hole, a pilot in George’s unit, explained that Bush’s medal count had been held down during the war by the policy of his outfit’s commanding officer: “I think you got Air Medals for every five strikes you went on . . . our group, and this was the skipper’s decision, I presume, along with the air group commander, didn’t award anything of that nature, it was strictly on the merits of the mission.”
By June 1964, George had won the primary runoff, and in July he went to the GOP convention in San Francisco as a Goldwater delegate. His father also attended the convention as an alternate delegate from Connecticut, secretly leaning toward the moderate William Scranton, governor of Pennsylvania. Afterward Prescott wrote to his friend Sam Bemiss and asked him to come to Kennebunkport: “I want to tell you about our trip to SF for the convention. It was especially interesting, as Pop was there with his Texas delegation and quite it’s [
sic
] hero because of his recent primary victory. The corps of Texas news men think our George has a good chance to win in Nov. Wouldn’t that be sumpin’?”
When President Johnson signed the civil rights bill into law in July 1964, George continued wrapping himself in the mantle of states’ rights, which was conservative code for no federal intervention on racial matters. “The new civil rights act was passed to protect 14 percent of the people,” George said. “I’m also worried about the other 86 percent.” At every campaign stop he thumped Senator Yarborough for voting for the bill. “There is nothing more challenging to a conservative than to run against this man,” George said. “I am for the great traditions of this state and those of the Senate itself, and it irks my soul to see a man turn his back on his own people.”
“That was a vicious campaign,” recalled Alex Dickie Jr., an aide to Yarborough. “Bush tried to make Ralph look like a nigger lover . . . Bush played that racial card over and over and appealed to the lowest common denominator in people. He did it then and he has never stopped.”
To some people, Bush’s opposition to the civil rights bill put him in league with segregationists. Like them, George said he would “hate to see” the Constitution “trampled on in the process of trying to solve Civil Rights problems.” He said he drew support for his views from the strong showing of the blatantly racist governor of Alabama, George Wallace, in the Democratic primaries. “This indicates to me that there must be general concern from many responsible people over the Civil Rights bill from all over the nation.”
Charles Sargent Caldwell, a Senate aide to Yarborough, felt the political repercussions of his boss’s vote for the legislation. “George Bush attacked us for that vote practically every time he made a speech . . . Bush’s people—he had lots of surrogates, of course—would never make a speech on behalf of the Republican candidates that they didn’t bring up Ralph voting for this Civil Rights Act.”
By the summer of 1964 George Bush had become convinced that he was going to win. He had collected the endorsements of twenty Texas newspapers, including both Dallas papers, both papers in Fort Worth, and
The Houston Chronicle
. When he formed a statewide organization of Democrats for Bush, even President Johnson started to worry.
“Now the problem we’ve got is getting Yarborough to beat this attractive young boy, Bush,” the President told the union leader Walter Reuther. “And he [Yarborough] ought to quit fighting with [Governor John] Connally and every Democrat . . . The only ones he ought to cuss is Republicans . . . They’ll wind up having Tower in the Senate and having Bush in the Senate. That’s the way they’re going. Of course, Yarborough is a very weak candidate. Civil rights and union labor and the Negro thing is not the way to get elected in a state that elects Connally by 72 percent . . . He’s handicapped in that state. Now he wouldn’t be handicapped in Michigan or New York, but he’s handicapped in Texas.”
The Democratic Party in Texas was divided into conservatives like the popular Governor John Connally, moderates like President Lyndon Johnson, and liberals like Senator Yarborough, who was a minority in his own party and known to be quarrelsome.
George Bush figured that anyone as disputatious as Yarborough could not possibly win. The boy who had grown up needing to be liked by everyone was now a forty-year-old man who believed his likability was invincible. “Ralph Yarborough is unpopular in the State,” George wrote Lud Ashley, “and even though the President comes from Texas, I think there will be many people who will want to see Yarborough bumped off.”
Tough, seasoned, and twenty years older, the senator dismissed George as a pretty-boy pip-squeak who was bankrolled by rich Texas racists. Although Yarborough’s campaign was disorganized and underfinanced, he hammered away at his opponent as a rich carpetbagger who belonged “to all them fat Houston clubs.” When George was questioned about his memberships in the Bayou Club, the Ramada Club, and the Houston Country Club—all whites-only clubs—he said he had no problem with belonging. “I always believe people should associate with their friends in things like that.” Yarborough jabbed him as a “Connecticut Yankee,” and George shot back: “I’d rather be from Connecticut and for Texas than from Texas and for Walter Reuther.”