The cowboy style is an implicit pledge of allegiance to the mentality the myth embodies, which can be denominated as rugged individualism. The world is full of danger, and the cowboy has to be ready to defend himself and his family. In place of the law, the cowboy lives by a code of fairness and rough justice. He doesn’t impose his will on others, and he bridles at the suggestion that anyone—especially government—has a right to tell him what to do. God and nature are forceful presences in the cowboy’s life, although his stark and unforgiving circumstances, combined with endless spans of boredom, give rise to stoic bouts of existential despair. Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings sang a memorable duet, “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” which speaks to the solitary blankness of such a life:
Cowboys ain’t easy to love and they’re harder to hold
They’d rather give you a song than diamonds or gold
Lonestar belt buckles and old faded Levi’s and each night begins a new day
If you don’t understand him and he don’t die young
He’ll probably just ride away.
* * *
IN 1948, George H. W. Bush—a decorated naval aviator during the Second World War, a graduate of Yale, son of a future U.S. senator from Connecticut, and an aspiring young oilman—moved his family to a little duplex on a dirt road in Odessa. It was hot, dry, flat as a tortilla, and 350 miles from the nearest airport, in Dallas. They shared a bathroom with two prostitutes—a mother-daughter combo—and often got locked out of the toilet by thoughtless clients. In 1950, the Bushes and their two children at the time, George W. and Robin, moved to Midland, a larger city twenty miles down the road, which was the headquarters of nearly every independent oilman in Texas. It is called Midland because it is halfway between Fort Worth and El Paso. The Bushes purchased a three-bedroom frame house on West Ohio Avenue. “We like to say that we’re the only presidential house that was home to two presidents, two governors, and a first lady,” my guide, Melissa Hagins, said as she took me through the house.
Midland in the fifties was an unpolished, hard-drinking boomtown. The Bushes arrived as a powerful civilizing force. They raised money to build a theater, a YMCA, and a symphony. Barbara was the den mother for the Cub Scouts. George taught Sunday school and coached Little League. There were enough other Ivy Leaguers also seeking their fortunes in West Texas that Bush started a branch of the Yale Club. In 1953, together with the brothers Hugh and Bill Liedtke, he formed an oil exploration company that he called Zapata after Marlon Brando’s movie Viva Zapata! came out. They drilled 127 wells in West Texas without a single dry hole.
The walls of the Bush house are knotty pine, giving it the feel of a lake cottage. The tiny living room has a built-in seat in the bay window and a television of the era, with a rabbit-ears antenna. There is a fireplace in the dining room. George W.’s room has a foldout desk attached to a bookcase, built to replicate the one that had been there when he was a boy. There is a train set, a Cub Scout uniform draped across the bed, and a picture of little George riding a jackalope. Above the bed is a poster of Roy Rogers, “King of the Cowboys,” atop his gorgeous palomino mount, Trigger. My guide told me that George and his friends carried a copy of “The Roy Rogers Riders Club Rules” in their wallets. “Be neat and clean,” Roy advises. “Protect the weak and help them. Eat all your food and never waste any.” There are ten altogether. Roy was prim and modest, with a smooth tenor voice, the kind of role model parents adore; but there was another force stirring the universe at the same time, darker and sexier, not at all wholesome. For boys our age, Roy Rogers was the anti-Elvis. I’m a year younger than George W., and Roy Rogers was a big figure in my life as well. I had a Roy Rogers cap gun, which I recently saw listed on eBay for a thousand bucks.
There is a single bathroom, with a tub, no shower, and a master bedroom in the corner, with a view of the large fenced backyard and doghouse. The kitchen has a window over the sink, a gas stove, and what would have been an extravagance at the time, a washer and dryer. A small sunroom with clapboard walls became Jeb’s nursery when he was born in 1953.
The third bedroom has no door on it. The Bushes took it off when their daughter, Robin, was diagnosed with leukemia in 1954. It took her seven months to die. “That’s when Mrs. Bush’s hair turned white,” Melissa told me. “She colored it for many years and then finally gave up.” Barbara Bush was twenty-eight years old. She later recounted that the only thing that pulled her out of her prolonged depression was hearing George W. tell a friend that he couldn’t play because “I have to take care of my mother.”
Like many Texans, I harbor a fondness for the Bush family that has nothing to do with their politics. Numberless people in the state can testify to their kindness and decency. Laura Bush was a librarian at a public school in Austin; as first lady of the state, she started the Texas Book Festival, which has been a boon to the state’s libraries. (Later, she also began the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.) Our daughter, Caroline, went to Austin High School with George and Laura’s twins, Jenna and Barbara, when their father was governor. We used to go to the Christmas party at the Governor’s Mansion each year, and the governor always asked Caroline to dance. He really liked to boogie; his shirt would get so sweaty you could see his body hair. “I don’t drink or do drugs,” he told me, “so I gotta do something to get it out of my system.”
Texas was still in transition from its days of being overwhelmingly Democratic to being solidly Republican—two eras bookended by LBJ and George W. In each case, the metamorphosis of Texas politics would profoundly change the nation.
When Bush was governor, between 1995 and 2000, a cordial détente existed between the parties. The lieutenant governor, Bob Bullock, and Pete Laney, the Speaker of the House, were both Democrats, and they became exhibits in Bush’s argument that he would be a bipartisan president. Bullock was a titanic figure, whose ruinous personal life—alcoholism, cancer, chronic depression, five marriages—only added to his legend. He reminded me of Lyndon Johnson, with the same huge, battered face and an unbridled love of Texas that allowed him to see over the barriers of party loyalties. At Bush’s fiftieth birthday party at the Governor’s Mansion, in July 1996, Bullock offered a toast to the governor as “the next president of the United States.” As far as I know, that was the first time such a statement had been made in public, and it was made by the highest Democratic official in the state.
That same year, Bush launched a new statewide reading initiative at the school where Roberta was teaching, Travis Heights Elementary, and the principal chose to stage the press event in Roberta’s classroom. Roberta taught a mixed kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade class, and she agreed reluctantly, since the event was scheduled to take place at naptime. She picked out some of her best readers to sit on the governor’s lap, but when the news crews and reporters trooped in, one of her troublemakers, Ricky Hernandez, impish and adorable, crept through the crowd and caught Bush’s eye. “Hey, padnah, hop on up,” Bush said, and Ricky, who couldn’t read a lick, crawled into the governor’s lap. Bush read There’s a Ghost in the Boys’ Bathroom, as Ricky beamed, and of course that was the picture on the front pages of the newspapers the next morning. What wasn’t reported was that later that afternoon Roberta had to send Ricky home because he had head lice.
In 1998, I was asked to read at a fundraising event for literacy that the former first lady Barbara Bush puts on in Houston each year. A well-known writer, Stephen Ambrose, had fallen ill, and they needed a substitute—tomorrow! Would I mind flying down with the governor? I wouldn’t mind. I went over to the mansion the next afternoon and found the governor noshing pound cake in the kitchen. He was cheery and familiar. He always seemed a much more natural politician than his father, and totally at ease, like a gifted athlete who didn’t feel the need to train. “Has Dad left yet?” the governor asked his mother on the phone before we left. “I need a hat. Tell him to bring
several.”
We flew on George W.’s personal plane, a King Air turboprop that Laura described as “perfect for Texas.” By now, I and everyone else were sizing him up as a future president. He seemed unfazed by the challenge ahead of him. He picked up The Dallas Morning News from the pile of newspapers on the seat in front of him, glanced at it, then set it down. We chatted a bit about the Middle East. I had just been in Jerusalem, and I told him about the rift between American Jews and the Orthodox rabbinate in Israel, which had declared that the Reform and Conservative branches of the faith were not true Jews. Bush was unaware of the issue, but observed, “They better be careful they don’t cut off their money base.” I was struck by how little he knew about the region, or anyplace, really, outside of Texas. I often wondered how the son of a former president—who had also been ambassador to the United Nations and envoy to China, as well as director of the CIA—could be so unacquainted with the wider world. I inquired about a recent visit the governor had with a Russian strongman, Alexander Lebed. Bush had been amused by the Russian’s fierce demeanor, which he said quickly melted away. “I always ask them about their families,” which apparently did the trick. George W.’s complacency and his absence of curiosity, traits that would come to define him, and doom him, were already apparent on that airplane ride.
At the fundraiser, I was wedged into the program among writers who were household names, and because I didn’t have a recent book to promote, I read an article I had written about Caroline’s doll, whom she named Nephew. He was a ratty little cloth doll of a type called Monchhichis, made to look like some kind of diabolical lower primate. Nephew came into Caroline’s possession when she was four. She was always telling me stories of his travels, to China or Dallas, and his many wives. I felt like the sultan Shahryar listening to the tales of Scheherazade. But then Caroline would throw Nephew over a balcony and imitate his screams as he fell to the street. When Caroline turned five, Barbie came into her life, and Nephew got sidelined. Finally, she gave the doll to me. “You’re the only one who loves him now,” she said.
A few days after the reading, I got a letter from the former president, which I suspect was typical of the thousands he wrote every year. He had typed it himself with several emendations scribbled in the margins. “Last night Barbara and I…got to talking about Nephew, engaging fellow that he obviously is.
“But did you know that George and Laura’s daughter Barbara has a Nephew-like icon named ‘Spikey’? Once Spikey got lost in the V.P. house—a crisis, much like the tanks rolling through the streets of Budapest, narrowly averted when Spikey was found hidden under a living room couch.
“Just ten days ago Spikey, still in tow, went to Italy with the twins and Barbara. Too bad Nephew couldn’t make it.”
A year later, as the presidential primaries were about to begin, I ran into Laura at Antone’s, the Austin blues club. Marcia Ball was playing. Laura was in the company of friends, drinking and smoking, which you never saw her do. It was a sweet moment, but I immediately thought how this intimate little community we all lived in was about to end. Soon the cameras would roll into town, reporters would be knocking over gravestones, and everything in our culture would be scrutinized and dissected. I had been a part of that process many times. Like it or not, we would be onstage, we would be reviewed, some of us would become famous beyond our circle, and others would be indicted.
* * *
BUSH FATHER AND SON provide a riveting field of study for anyone interested in Oedipal dramas. George W. went to the same schools, first Andover and then Yale, where the father had become a Phi Beta Kappa and the son became president of his fraternity. George W. did, however, go to Harvard Business School. Like his father, the son was a naval pilot, but whereas the father earned a Distinguished Flying Cross while serving in the Pacific theater during the Second World War, the son served in the Texas Air National Guard, which was a well-known refuge from the Vietnam War for privileged sons of prominent men and players for the Dallas Cowboys. Both Bushes became oilmen in Midland, where the father was a legend and the son broke even. George H.W. was a graceful athlete; he had been scouted by major-league teams when he played first base for Yale, and in Midland he used to dazzle the boys he coached by catching fly balls behind his back. George W. was a gym rat who would boast that in his first term as president, he had actually gained muscle mass. By becoming a partial owner of the Texas Rangers, the son eclipsed his father’s baseball career, as he did as president when he was reelected to a second term in office. Both men would invade Iraq, the first time for good reasons and the second time for a lie sold to the American people, which would cause enduring damage to our country and set fire to the Middle East.
Neither man was the least bit self-reflective, a quality they seemed to think weak and pointless. “I don’t brood,” George W. said dismissively. Despite their Ivy League educations, each of them had a tendency to wander off into linguistic labyrinths that generated much discussion in psychiatric literature. When he was running for president the first time, George H.W. boasted about his close relationship to Ronald Reagan. “I have worked alongside him, and I am proud to be his partner. We have had triumphs. We have made mistakes. We have had sex.” There was a startled gasp in the audience as Bush regrouped. “We have had setbacks,” he corrected. When he was running for reelection, he remarked: “Somebody said…‘We pray for you over there.’ That was not just because I threw up on the prime minister of Japan, either. Where was he when I needed him? But I said, ‘Let me tell you something.’ And I say this—I don’t know whether any ministers from the Episcopal Church are here. I hope so. But I said to him this. ‘You’re on to something here. You cannot be President of the United States if you don’t have faith. Remember Lincoln, going to his knees in times of trial in the Civil War and all that stuff. You can’t be. And we are blessed. So don’t feel sorry for—don’t cry for me, Argentina.’ ” Newsweek began calling him the “Mysterious Easterner.”
Bush-speak, as it became known, was taken to a new level by the son, who sometimes seemed to be totally unaware of the words marching out of his mouth. “More and more of our imports come from overseas,” he observed. On education: “Rarely is the question asked, ‘Is our children learning?’ ” On the eve of the election, he remarked, “They misunderestimated me.”
W. actually made fun of his predilection for nonsensical utterance. “Now, most people would say, in speaking of the economy, we ought to make the pie bigger,” he confessed at the annual Radio and Television Correspondents Association dinner in Washington soon after he took office. “I, however, am on record saying, ‘We ought to make the pie higher.’ It was a very complicated economic point I was trying to make.” He was so easy to like in the early days.
Bush was a good governor, not corrupt, a centrist by Texas standards. He had even tried to raise taxes on business in order to meet the growing social needs of the state. That was heresy in the Republican Party and went nowhere, but at least he acknowledged the disparities that made Texas so coldhearted to its less fortunate citizens. He might have waited through another election cycle before he ran, to gain more experience, but he told his friends he felt like a cork in a river, and he simply surrendered to the flow. Part of his drive seemed to be a deep dislike of the eventual Democratic candidate, Al Gore—“the kind of guy you always wanted to punch out in high school,” Bush told me at a Christmas gathering in 1998, before running off to church. “I’ll pray for you,” he said, as he playfully grabbed me by the neck. “I’ll pray for myself, too.”
Everything nearly came to an ignominious end for Bush in November 1999, as the presidential race was under way. The governor was jogging around Lady Bird Lake, trailed by his bodyguard, Roscoe Hughey, a state trooper, on a bicycle. Suddenly, a waste-disposal truck, which was carrying a trailer full of construction debris, careened out of control. Bush saw the trailer just as it began to tip over. He instinctively dove under a bridge
culvert, getting scraped and bruised, as the trailer dumped debris on top of his bodyguard.
I later asked Bush about the incident, wondering if he’d done something to piss off the garbage workers. He laughed, but it really was a close call. “Roscoe’s eyes were rolling back in his head,” he told me. “I said, ‘Roscoe, what’s my name? What’s my name?’ Fortunately, he got it right the first time.”
In the 2000 primaries, W. lost to John McCain in New Hampshire by 17 points, nearly torpedoing his campaign. Twelve years before, in the same Republican primaries, George H.W. had carried the entire East Coast. “My father is not a Texan,” the governor explained. He said that, immediately after New Hampshire, he had been talking to his chief strategist, Karl Rove, about how to recover, and then, when Rove left, Laura said that she had two points she wanted to make. “One, Texans don’t win in the East.” The second point was about McCain. “You let him talk down to you.” Bush seemed amazed by her insight. “This was a librarian from Midland, Texas, telling me this!”
On Election Day, I watched returns with friends in Dallas. During cocktails, Florida was declared for Democratic nominee Al Gore, and we went to dinner, certain that the election was over. By the time I got to my hotel room, Florida had flipped to Bush. I awakened at five in the morning and turned on the TV. Gore was now winning both the popular vote and the electoral vote, with Florida and Oregon still outstanding. This was only a couple of hours after the networks had declared Florida for Bush, and Gore had called him to concede, then called back twenty minutes later to withdraw his concession.