George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

These were the circumstances in which Nixon, having won the nomination on the first
ballot, met with his advisers amidst the grotesque architecture of the fifteenth floor of the
Miami Plaza-Hilton in the early morning of August 9, 1968. The way Nixon tells the
story in his memoirs, he had already pretty much settled on Gov. Spiro Agnew of
Maryland, reasoning that "with George Wallace in the race, I could not hope to sweep he
South. It was absolutely necessary, therefore, to win the entire rimland of the South--the
border states--as well as the major states of the Midwest and West." Therefore, says
Nixon, he let his advisors mention names without telling them what he had already
largely decided. "The names most mentioned by those attending were the familiar ones:
Romney, Reagan, John Lindsay, Percy, Mark Hatfield, John Tower, George Bush, John
Volpe, Rockefeller, with only an occasional mention of Agnew, sometimes along with
Governors John Love of Colorado and Daniel Evans of Washington." [fn 21] Nixon also
says that he offered the vice presidency to his close friends Robert Finch and Rogers
Morton, and then told his people that he wanted Agnew.
But this account disingenuously underestimates how close Bush came to the vicepresidency
in 1968. According to a well-informed, but favorable, short biography of
Bush published as he was about to take over the White House, "at the 1968 GOP
convention that nominated Nixon for President, Bush was said to be on the four-name
short list for vice president. He attributed that to the campaigning of his friends, but the
seriousness of Nixon's consideration was widely attested. Certainly Nixon wanted to
promote Bush in one way or another." [fn 22] Theodore H. White puts Bush on Nixon's
conservative list along with Tower and Howard Baker, with a separate category of
liberals and also "political eunuchs" like Agnew and Massachusetts Governor John
Volpe. [fn 23] Jules Witcover thought the reason that Bush had been eliminated was that
he "was too young, only a House member, and his selection would cause trouble with
John Tower," who was also an aspirant. [fn 24] The accepted wisdom is that Nixon
decided not to choose Bush because, after all, he was only a one -term Congressman.
Most likely, Nixon was concerned with comparisons that could be drawn with Barry
Goldwater's 1964 choice of New York Congressman Bill Miller for his running mate.
Nixon feared that if he, only four years later, were to choose a Congressman without a
national profile, the hostile press would compare him to Goldwater and brand him as yet
another Republican loser.
Later in August, Bush traveled to Nixon's beachfront motel suite at Mission Bay,
California to discuss campaign strategy. It was decided that Bush, Howard Baker, Rep.
Clark MacGregor of Minnesota, and Gov. Volpe would all function as "surrogate
candidates," campaigning and standing in for Nixon at engagements Nixon could not fill.
And there is George, in a picture on the top of the front page of the New York Times of
August 17, 1968, joining with the other three to slap a grinning and euphoric Nixon on
the back and shake his hand before they went forth to the hustings.
Bush had no problems of his own with the 1968 election, since he was running
unopposed -- a neat trick for a Republican in Houston, even taking the designer
gerrymandering into account. Running unopposed seems to be Bush's idea of an ideal
election. According to the Houston Chronicle, "Bush ha[d] become so politically