George Bush’s political career was marked by reinvention
He went from oil fields to White House before returning to active civic life here
George H.W. Bush, a former World War II Navy pilot, never saw such a sea of angry faces as he did that night at Houston’s Memorial High School.
It was April 17, 1968 — two weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King. It also had been only a week since the future president, then Houston’s first Republican congressman, had voted for the Fair Housing Act, Lyndon Johnson’s landmark bill barring racial discrimination in housing.
There were death threats. Nobody recognized this former Harris County GOP chairman, once a Barry Goldwater Republican who had pledged to vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the name of states’ rights.
It was a vow that still weighed on Bush’s heart. Earlier that year, he had seen African-American troops in Vietnam. He had heard the calls of the civil rights leaders who marched in Selma, Ala., and Washington.
It was a milestone for Bush and the city of Houston, his adopted home after striking it rich in the West Texas oil fields. It had all been such a stark detour from his genteel upbringing in the upper crust of New England society.
Peter Roussel, his longtime press aide, still remembers the booing and hissing in the Houston school auditorium. “I’m not sure he expected it to be as hostile as it was,” he said.
Bush, a Yale graduate and son of moderate Connecticut U.S. Sen. Prescott Bush, quoted the 18th century philosopher Edmund Burke. “I voted from conviction,” he said, “not out of intimidation or fear, but because of a feeling deep in my heart that this was the right thing for me to do.”
By the end of the night, Roussel recalled, Bush had won over the crowd. “It was one of the finest moments of his entire career.”
It also was a moment that grounded his legacy in Houston, a city at the vortex of Bush’s rise in politics during an era of transformation. Waves of conservative Southerners disenchanted with Johnson’s pro-integration politics were flocking to the GOP fold.
Republicans were not plentiful in Texas in the early 1960s when Bush took over as chairman of the Harris County Republican Party. Building the party sometimes meant accommodating hard-right John Birch Society members whose beliefs didn’t necessarily align with the Bush family’s old-line Republican thinking. Bush’s 1966 election to Congress from Houston helped show the way.
The strain of those divisions would continue to provide the backdrop for Bush’s subsequent successes and failures in national politics, a career that helped shape the growth of Houston as a global business powerhouse.
Former Bush White House aide Chase Untermeyer said there never was much doubt that Bush was a creature of the establishment, representing the party’s traditional, pro-business core in the face of ideological extremes. “They’ve taken on different names,” said Untermeyer, who was named ambassador to Qatar under Bush’s son, President George W. Bush. “Maybe it was the John Birch Society then, or the tea party in our time. And then there were just basic conservatives, and in that category was George H.W. Bush. He never ran from that.”
As vice president and president, the elder Bush stayed tethered to Houston, even when the connection was as thin a reed as his official residence in the Houstonian Hotel.
Pundits at the time said he never would return to Houston or build a house on a narrow parcel he had bought in the Post Oak neighborhood after his loss to Ronald Reagan in 1980. He did both.
“I don’t think there was any thought otherwise, because the Bushes were so rooted in the community,” Untermeyer said. “He always had that plot of land and it happened to be exactly where they built the house they’re living in now.”
Bush’s 1992 defeat to Bill Clinton ended his presidency after one term. By then, the arc of his career was well known: wildcatter; congressman; twice a failed Senate candidate; United Nations ambassador; Watergateera chairman of the Republican National Committee; envoy to China; CIA director; Reagan’s vice president.
From Connecticut to Texas to Washington, Bush’s was a résumé of reinvention.
“His is a uniquely American story,” said former U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, until recently the dean of the George Bush School of Government & Public Policy at Texas A&M University. “Born and bred in New England for generations, yet a completely transplanted Texan.”
Bush’s return to Houston launched a new and less wellknown phase of civic engagement and philanthropy. A tally kept by the Bush Library counts 550 charities and nonprofits in which Bush and his wife Barbara have been involved since his presidency, including the volunteer organization Points of Light. More than 100 of them have been in Houston, from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center to the Urban League.
One of Bush’s most significant acts of Bayou City boosterism may have come as president in 1990, when he steered the Group of Seven summit of industrialized nations to his hometown. That was followed two years later by the 1992 Republican National Convention.
The G7, in particular, showed off the city to the world and is credited with helping usher in a revival of civic pride and success not seen since the oil boom years of the 1970s, when Houston was known as the capital of the Sun Belt.
“We were just coming out of a recession at that point, after the oil bust of the mid-1980s, and that gave Houston a nice shot in the arm,” said George H.W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation CEO David Jones, a longtime family friend who did advance work and fundraising for both events. “It really gave Houston a lift at the right time.”
After that, the Bushes dove into the civic life of Houston, where they often are seen at major cultural, sporting and political events. “They’re not recluses,” Untermeyer said. “They go to Astros, Rockets and Texans games. They go to plays at the Alley Theatre. They go to restaurants. They are very much seen in the community, which you’d think 90-year-olds wouldn’t do, or not do so often.”
At 92, Bush has been slowed by a form of Parkinson’s disease, forcing him to use a wheelchair. That did not keep the Bushes away from the GOP presidential debate at the University of Houston on Feb. 25, shortly after Donald Trump had knocked their son, Jeb, out of the race.
“You’d think out of general principle they’d not have felt any need to go,” Untermeyer said. “But they went. I think that’s because they’re devoted to Houston.”
Friends and associates say Bush retains his enthusiasm for the city’s future, including the planned Houston-Dallas bullet train. Recently at the family’s summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, Bush told his top aide, Jean Becker, that he wants to be on the first train.
According to Jones, she reminded him that the line is not scheduled to start operating until 2021. “And his response was, ‘What’s your point?’ ”