Former President George H.W. Bush died at the age of 94 on Friday, but as is our wont at Daily Kos Elections, we'll devote ourselves to taking stock of his early political career, which featured two unsuccessful Senate bids that bookended a brief tenure in the House in the 1960s.
Bush was the son of wealthy Connecticut Sen. Prescott Bush, a progressive Republican who notably spoke out against fellow Sen. Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt. After serving in World War II as a combat pilot, the younger Bush relocated to West Texas and got a job with a family friend in the oil industry. In 1951, Bush co-founded an oil company of his own, and he became wealthy in his own right two years later when it merged with another firm.
In 1963, the same year that his father left the Senate, Bush turned his eye to politics for the first time. Bush, who was now living in Houston, successfully ran to lead the Harris County GOP, saying that local Republicans encouraged him to get in to stop members of the far-right John Birch Society from taking over.
Bush’s election as county chair came at a time when Democrats were still in firm control of Texas, but there were already signs that Republicans were gaining strength. In 1961, John Tower won a special election for Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s former Senate seat, becoming the first Republican to win a direct election to the Senate in any of the 11 former Confederate states since the passage of the 17th Amendment half a century earlier. The next year, Democrat John Connally only modestly defeated oil executive Jack Cox 54-46 in the race for governor (Connally would switch to the GOP in 1973), while Republicans flipped a House seat in Midland (though they still only held only two of the state’s 23 congressional districts at the time).
In late July of 1963, Bush published an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle laying out the party’s pitch heading into the next election year, which also gives us a window into the local political state of affairs at this early point in his career. Bush lamented that his party had “the problem of the downtown businessman who thinks Republican, votes Republican, occasionally gives quietly Republican, but for ‘political’ reasons won't identify as a Republican.” To overcome this problem, Bush argued, required electing Republicans to local and statewide office to make rank-and-file voters feel comfortable describing themselves as Republicans.
Bush also defended his county party from what he called attempts by “liberals” to portray them as racists, writing that the GOP’s “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.”
While Bush turned out to be wrong in his twin predictions that, with Republicans in power, Houston “would become and would remain a great Republican stronghold,” and that black voters would be “highly receptive” to the GOP’s message, he was right in one regard. Bush correctly foresaw that, while some believed there was no real difference between the two parties, that would change. Bush predicted that conservatives would flock to the GOP as the distinctions between the two parties became more stark, writing, “As conservative Democrats in the South seek vainly for the now-extinct party of their ancestors, the ideological lines become much more clear.”
However, that time and place was not 1964 Texas. About a month after his op-ed was published, Bush kicked off a Senate bid against Democratic incumbent Ralph Yarborough. Yarborough was a prominent liberal in a conservative state, and Bush had argued in his editorial that his views were so out-of-step with most Texans that “as other candidates philosophically aligned with Sen. Yarborough gain prominence, the Republican party will grow.” But whatever chance Bush had to unseat Yarborough faded after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas and former Texas Sen. Lyndon Johnson became president.
Bush didn’t give up on his uphill race, though. In the GOP primary runoff, he defeated Cox, who just two years earlier had waged a competitive campaign for governor, 62-38 in the primary runoff. Bush then went after Yarborough, who was the only senator from the former Confederacy to vote for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. While Bush had led a fundraiser for the Negro College Fund while in college and had written just the year before about the importance of winning over black voters, he vehemently opposed the Civil Rights Act on the campaign trail.
Bush berated the law as “politically inspired,” terming it “bad legislation in that it transcends the Constitution.” He went on to attack Walter Reuther, the powerful leader of the United Auto Workers, for having “donated $50 to the militant Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.” Bush also warned voters about “socialistic” Medicare, which would end up being passed the next year.
Bush may have accurately forecast where his party’s fortunes would eventually lead in Texas, but he ended up losing to Yarborough 56-44. The future president did run far ahead of GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, who lost Texas to Johnson (himself an old intra-party adversary of Yarborough), by a wide 63-37 margin; Texas Republicans also lost their only two House seats that year. After his defeat, Bush told his minister, “I took some of the far-right positions to get elected. I hope I never do it again. I regret it.”
Bush got the chance to run a different campaign two years later in 1966 after he was the lead plaintiff in a successful lawsuit that forced Texas to redraw its congressional map in the wake of the Supreme Court's revolutionary "one person, one vote" decisions that invalidated unequal-population districts around the country. Texas Democrats had deprived Republican-leaning urban and suburban areas like Houston's Harris County of equal representation, and when the court ruling forced a redrawn map that gave the county a third seat, Bush sought a newly drawn affluent suburban district on its west side.
Bush was true to his word to his minister and pitched himself as a moderate, saying of Johnson’s legislative program, “I generally favor the goals as outlined in the Great Society.” By contrast, Democrats fielded Harris County District Attorney Frank Briscoe, whom the Texas Observer described at the time as “one of the most vicious prosecutors in Houston's history.”
The year 1966 was very different for Texas Republicans than 1964 had been. Tower decisively won re-election to the Senate, and he even carried Harris County with 60 percent of the vote. At the same time, Bush beat Briscoe 57-43 and became Houston’s first Republican member of Congress since Reconstruction. Republicans would continue to represent much of this area until 2018, when Democrat Lizzie Pannill Fletcher flipped the contemporary version of Texas’s 7th.
Still, Bush wasn’t fully satisfied despite his wide win. In his 1987 autobiography, which Bush wrote as vice president ahead of his successful presidential bid, he said of his campaign that it was “both puzzling and disappointing” he’d attracted so few black voters. In this retelling, Bush recounted all the outreach he’d done to African Americans as Harris County party chair, but he never acknowledged his vehement opposition to the Civil Rights Act during his Senate race just two years earlier.
Bush very quickly gained influence in D.C. when he was appointed to the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, a very rare honor for a freshman. Despite his old opposition to the Civil Rights Act, he backed the 1968 Fair Housing Act that outlawed racial discrimination in housing. While Bush later wrote that this vote stirred up conservative opposition back home, he was re-elected without any opposition.
In 1970, President Richard Nixon, who had considered Bush as a possible running mate, persuaded him to give up his House seat and seek a rematch with Yarborough. This time, Bush’s Senate prospects seemed far better. Yarborough had alienated more conservatives through his continued support for civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War, as well as his votes against Nixon’s conservative Supreme Court nominees and allowing prayer in school.
However, someone else defeated Yarborough before Bush got the chance to face him. Wealthy former Rep. Lloyd Bentsen ran to Yarborough’s right in the Democratic primary and aired TV ads portraying his rival as an ally of violent anti-war protestors. Bentsen beat Yarborough 54-46, and suddenly, Bush didn’t have the opponent he’d expected.
In the general election, both candidates adopted many similar conservative stances, including support for Nixon’s Vietnam policies. In what was still a conservative Democratic state, Bentsen managed to both run against the “Washington Republican establishment” while at the same time attacking Bush for not being conservative enough when it came to gun laws and welfare policies. Meanwhile, prominent economist John Kenneth Galbraith encouraged his fellow liberals to back Bush, arguing that, while both candidates were equally conservative, a Bentsen win would “tighten the hold of conservatives on the Texas Democratic Party, force the rest of us to contend with them nationally and leave the state with the worst of all choices—a choice between two conservative parties.”
Bush, by contrast, ran ads arguing “I can do more for Texas” because of his access to the Nixon administration. However, this strategy may have done him more harm than good. Bentsen portrayed Bush as a Nixon lackey, declaring, “The president of the United States didn't put me in this race. I'm not in the position of Mr. Bush. When the president says jump, he says frog.” Bentsen also ran ads arguing that the Nixon administration was threatening to close military bases in San Antonio. Additionally, Bush also was hurt by the perception that the administration’s oil policies would hurt Texas’s economy, while a school desegregation lawsuit filed by Nixon’s Justice Department in East Texas during the campaign further alienated the conservative voters that Bush needed.
At the same time, while many angry Yarborough supporters had threatened to vote for Bush or stay home, Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew’s visits to the state on the GOP nominee’s behalf may have encouraged them to support Bentsen to spite the White House. While a poll a month before Election Day gave Bush a 2-point lead, Bentsen ended up beating him 53.5-46.5, a defeat that stunned the Republican candidate.
In his concession speech, Bush declared, “Like Custer, who said there were too many Indians, I guess there were too many Democrats.” Candidly, he concluded, “I have this horrible problem in figuring this thing out. I can't think of anyone to blame except myself.” However, Bush would eventually get the last laugh 18 years later when he’d be elected president by defeating Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis and his running mate, none other than Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen.
While Bush never again served in Congress, he didn’t stay out of the political arena for long. The Nixon administration offered Bush a White House job, but Bush insisted on being nominated ambassador to the United Nations, to which Nixon agreed. The nomination of a two-term congressman with little diplomatic experience was controversial, but Bush was confirmed early in 1971. Bush went on to lead the Republican National Committee, act as the unofficial ambassador to China as relations between the two nations were thawing in the 1970s, run the CIA, serve as Ronald Reagan’s vice president, and ultimately, occupy the White House himself.