George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography

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annum. This bill was finally passed after years of dogged effort by Yarborough against the


opposition of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. Yarborough wobtaining a five year extension of the Hill-Burton act, which provided 4,000 aas instrumental indditional beds in (^)
Veterans Administration Hospitals. In physical improvements, Yarborough supported
appropriations for coastal navigation. He fought for $29 million for the Rural Electrification
Administration for counties in the Corpus Christi area alone. In eleven counties in that part of
Texas, Yarborough haunder the Kennedy Administration accelerated public works projects program to provide cleand helped obtain federal grants for $4.5 million and loans of $.64 million (^)
water and sewers for towns and cities that could not otherwise afford them. Concerning his
committment to this type of infrastructure, Yarborough commented to a dinner in Corpus Christi:
"These are the projects, along with the ship channels, dams and reservoirs, water research programs,
hurricane and flood control programs that bring delegations of city officials, members of countycourt, members of river and watershed authorities, co-op delegations, into my office literally by the (^)
thousands year after year for aid, which is always given, never refused." Yarborough went on:
"While our efforts and achievements are largely unpublicized...there is satisfaction beyond acclaim
when a small town without a water system is enabled to provide its people for the first time with
water and sewerage...when the course of a river is shored up a little to save a farmer's crops, when afreeway opens up new avenues of commerce." [fn 6] In the area of oil policy, always vital in Texas, (^)
Yarborough strained to give the industry everything it could reasonably expect, and more. Despite
this, he was implacably hated by many business circles. In short, Ralph Yarborough had a real
committment to racial and economic justice, and was, all in all, among the best that the post-New
Deal Democratic Party had to offer. Certainly there were weaknesses: one of the principal ones wasto veer in the direction of environmentalism. Here Yarborough was the prime mover behind the
Endangered Species Act.
Bush moved to Houston in 1959, bringing the corporate headquarters of Zapata Offshore with him.
Houston was by far the biggest city in Texas, a center of the corporate bureaucracies of firms doingbusiness in the oil patch. There was also the Baker and Botts law firm, which would function in
effect as part of the Bush family network, since Baker and Botts were the lawyers who had been
handling the affiars of the Harriman railroad interests in the southwest. One prominent lawyer in
Houston at the time was James Baker III, a scion of the family enshrined in the Baker and Botts
name, but himself a partner in another firm because of the so-called anti- nepotism rule thatprevented the children of Baker and Botts partners from joining the firm themselves. Soon Bus (^) h
would be hob-nobbing with Baker and other representatives of the Houston oligarchy, of the Hobby
and 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 notsurprising 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

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