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 under O'Donnell was able to mount a more formidable bid than previously
for the state house in Austin. The Republican candidate was Jack Cox, a party activist
with a right-wing profile. Bush agreed to serve as the Harris County co-chairman of the
Jack Cox for Governor finance committee. In the gubernatorial election of 1962, Cox
received 710,000 votes, a surprisingly large result. Connally won the governorship, and it
was in that capacity that he was present in the Kennedy motorcade in Dallas on
November 22, 1963.
During these years, a significant influence was exercised in the Texas GOP by the John
Birch Society, which had grown up during the 1950's through the leadership and
financing of Robert Welch. Water for the Birch mill was abundantly provided by the
liberal Republicanism of the Eisenhower administration, with counted Prescott Bush,
Nelson Rockefeller, Gordon Gray, and Robert Keith Gray among its most infleuntial
figures. In reaction against this Wall Street liberalism, the Birchers offered an ideology of
impotent negative protest based on self-righteous chauvinism in foreign affairs and the
mystifications of the free market at home. But they were highly suspicious of the
financier cliques of lower Manhattan, and to that extent they had George Bush's number.
Bush is still complaining about the indignities he suffered at the hands of these Birchers,
with whom he was straining to have as much as possible in common. But he met with
repeated frustration, because his Eastern Liberal Establishment pedigree was always
there. In his campaign autobiography, Bush laments that many Texans thought that
Redbook Magazine, published by his father-in-law Marvin Pierce of the McCall
Coporation, was an official publication of the Communist Party.
Bush recounts a campaign trip with his aide Roy Goodearle to the Texas panhandle,
during which he was working a crowd at one of his typical free food, free beer "political
barbecues." Bush gave one of his palm cards to a man who conceded that he had heard of
Bush, but quickly added that he could never support him. Bush thought this was because
he was running as a Republican. "But," [Bush] then realized, "my being a Republican
wasn't the thing bothering the guy. It was something worse than that." Bush's interlocutor
was upset over the fact that Zapata Offshore had eastern investors. When Bush whined
that all oil companies had eastern investors, for such was the nature of the business, his
tormentor pointed out that one of Bush's main campaign contributors, a prominent
Houston attorney, was not just a "sonofabitch," but also a member of the New York
Council on Foreign Relations.
Bush explains, with the whine in his larynx in overdrive: "The lesson was that in the
minds of some voters the Council on Foreign Relations was nothing more than a One
World tool of the Communist-Wall Street internationalist conspiracy, and to make
matters worse, the Houston lawyer had also worked for President Eisenhower-- a known