themselves by tossing darts at a balloons suspended in front of a photograph of President Johnson.
Bush told the Chronicle: "I saw the incident and it did not offend me. It was just a gag."
But Bush's pro-Goldwater efforts were not universally appreciated. In early July Craig Peper, the
current chairman of the party finance committee, stood up in a party gathering and attacked the
leaders of the Draft Goldwater movement, including Bush as "right wing extremists." Bush had not
been purging any Birchers, but he was not willing to permit such attacks from his left. Bushaccordingly purged Peper, demanding his resignation after a pro-Goldwater meeting at which Bush (^)
had boasted that he was "100% for the draft Goldwater move."
A few weeks after ousting Peper, Bush contributed one of his first public political statements as an
op ed in the Houston Chroniwhined that the county organization was "afflicted with some dry-martini critics who talk and don'tcle of 28 July 1963. Concerning he recent organizational problems, he (^)
work." Then, in conformity with his family doctrine and his own dominant obsession, Bush turned
to the issue of race. As a conservative, he had to lament that fact that "Negroes" "think that
conservatism means segregation." Nothing could be further from the truth. This was rather the
result of slanderous propaganda which Republican public relations men had not sufficiently refuted:"First, they attempt to present us as racists. The Republican party of Harris County is not a racist
party. We have not presented our story to the Negroes in the county. Our failure to attract the Negro
voter has not been because of a racist philosophy; rather, it has been a product of our not having had
the organization to tackle all parts of the country." What then was the GOP line on the race
question? "We believe in the basic premiss that the individual Negro surrenders the very dignity andfreedom he is struggling for when he accept money for his vote or when he goes along with the
block vote dictates of some Democratic boss who couldn't care less about the quality of the
candidates he is pushing." So the GOP would try to separate the black voter from the Democrats.
Bush conceded: "We have a tough row to hoe here."
After these pronouncements on race, Bush then want on to the trade union front. Yarborough's labor
backing was exceedingly strong, and Bush lost no time in assailing the state AFL-CIO and its
Committee on Political Education (COPE) for gearing up to help Yarborough in his race. For Bush
this meant that the AFL-CIO was not supporting the "two -party system." "A strong pitch is being
made to dun the [union] membership to help elect Yarborough"-- heYarborough's opponent is even known." charged -- "long before
Bush also spoke out during this period on foreign affairs, He demanded that President Kennedy
"muster the courage" to undertake a new attack on Cuba. [fn 13]
Before announcing his bid for the senate, Bush decided to take out what would appear in retrospect
to be a very important insurance policy for his future political career. On April 22, Bush, with the
support of Republican state chairman Peter O'Donnell, filed a suit in federal court calling for the
reapportionment of the Congressional districts in the Houston area. The suit argued that the urban
voters of Harris County were being partially disenfranchised by a system that favored rural votersand demanded as a remedy that a new Congressional district be drawn in the area. "This is not a
partisan matter," commented the civic-minded Bush. "This is something of concern to all Harris
County citizens." Bush would later win this suit, and that would lead to a court-ordered redistricting
which would create the Seventh Congressional District, primarily out of those precincts which Bush
had managed to carry in the 1964 Senate race. Was this the invisible hand of Skull and Bonewould also mean that there would be no entrenched incumbent, no incumbent of any kind, in thats? This
Seventh District when Bush got around to making his bid there in 1966. But for now, this was all
still in the future.
On September 10, 1963 Bush announced his campaign for the US Senate. He was fully endorsed by