George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

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.
Less than an hour's drive by car south of Houston lies Galveston, a port on the Gulf of
Mexico. Houston itself is connected to the Gulf by a ship channel which has permitted
the city to became a large port in its own right. Beyond Galveston there was the Gulf, and
beyond the Gulf the Greater Antilles with Cuba set in the middle of the archipelago, and
beyond Cuba Guatemala, Nicaragua, Granada, targets of filibusterers old and new.
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 was 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 1950's through the leadership and
financing of Robert Welch. Water for the Birch mill was abundantly provided by the
liberal Republicanism of the Eisenhower administration, with counted Prescott Bush,
Nelson Rockefeller, Gordon Gray, and Robert Keith Gray among its most infleuntial
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
Coporation, 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