Corpus Christi area alone. In eleven counties in that part of Texas, Yarborough had
helped obtain federal grants for $4.5 million and loans of $.64 million under the Kennedy
Administration accelerated public works projects program to provide clean 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 county court, 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 a
freeway 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 was to 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 doing business 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 that prevented the children of
Baker and Botts partners from joining the firm themselves. Soon Bush 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 not surprising to find him on the Harris